Like most things in 2020, summer at Trout Lake Station was very different this year. Normally, a handful of graduate students and several dozen mostly UW-Madison undergrads would spend summer living on station and conducting field work on everything from declining walleye populations in Northwoods lakes to making batteries out of bog water.
But this summer, thanks to a global pandemic, Trout Lake Station sat mostly empty and dozens of field technician positions went unfilled.
However, thanks to the now-mundane magic of the Internet and the generous support of some individual donors, the Center for Limnology was still able to offer a handful of fellowships for some aspiring young scientists to work remotely and help interpret and process a lot of the data CFL staff and graduate students were able to collect on our lakes.
As part of their fellowship, each undergrad had to record themselves giving a presentation of “What I Did This Summer.” Those presentations are now all up on our YouTube Channel. If you’re curious to learn more about the research going on in Wisconsin’s northern lakes or how our students got creative with their virtual field work and their presentations, it’s an excellent place to start!
Watch all the presentations here.