This past summer, Natural Infrastructure Fellow Hattie Greydanus stepped out of the classroom and into the field to gain hands-on experience implementing nature-based solutions.
As part of her internship requirement for the Natural Infrastructure Fellowship, a funded Master’s degree program courtesy of Ducks Unlimited and the Institute for Resilient Infrastructure Systems, Greydanus traveled to Washington and Oregon. During her internship, she had the opportunity to work with Ducks Unlimited staff and researchers, Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife officials, and other stakeholders as they installed real world natural infrastructure projects.
“[This internship] came at the perfect time. I’ve got two semesters under my belt of courses and working with my advisor. And now this summer, my personal motivation to do this internship was to gain experience in the field. It’s not necessarily related to my thesis, but it is directly applied back to the things that we’ve talked about in class,” Greydanus said of the opportunity.
Through these internships, Natural Infrastructure Fellows are able to gain understanding of the entire process of planning and implementing designs–invaluable experience for a generation of practitioners who will help reshape the way the world thinks about and implements infrastructure.
“So for example, yesterday I spent a 12-hour day doing construction staking,” Greydanus explained. “That’s the final step before the contractor goes in and starts to tear up the ground. It was a big swale through a wetland that gets filled up in the wintertime, and the Oregon Department of Fish and Wildlife wants to create this kind of meandering swale that slows water velocities and keeps the water on the land a little bit longer than the straight ditch that they have currently. We staked out the pathway of the swale, and it was really cool at the end of the day to see all the flags and imagine that swale being put in the ground. That’s something that I haven’t had the chance to do before–it’s a different stage in the design process, which was really exciting to see.”
Interdisciplinary collaboration is also a core part of the training Natural Infrastructure Fellows receive, both within their classes and out in the real world, on internships. Aside from working with Ducks Unlimited staff and state agency employees, Greydanus had the opportunity to stretch her collaboration skills with another sort of engineer: beavers.
“I’ve been able to work with the Ducks Unlimited folks in Washington on what’s called ‘the beaver deceiver project,’” Greydanus explained. “Essentially, instead of wetland managers needing to trap and remove beavers, they’re finding ways to make it okay for the beaver to stay on site. They just want an easier way to clean the culvert and the water control structure when they want to drain the wetland in order to prep for the summer farming. It was really cool to hear that the managers are okay with the beaver–like they’re a nuisance to a certain degree, but with all the research about the benefits of beaver, it was cool to see that managers are willing to work with them.”
The Beaver Deceiver is a device created by ecologist Skip Lisle, which essentially acts as a way to keep beavers out, while maintaining flow–allowing managers to perform the functions they need within the wetland, while also allowing beavers to remain. While intriguing, this balance isn’t an easy one to find:
“My advisor and I were thinking about writing a paper about beaver hazards. He worked on a paper about placing large woody debris in streams, and the hazards and considerations in doing that,” Greydanus explained. “Even though it’s a good thing, there’s a lot of human infrastructure that has been built up since streams were chock full of large woody debris, and beaver were all over the country. And so now, trying to balance restoration with human infrastructure is a big deal.”
Despite the challenges, Greydanus is firmly pro-beaver. “Man, talk about a persistent animal. They work. We live close to this little park and one time I took a little night walk. It was like nine at night. And we heard a little beaver chewing away, right off the path. Everyone else was going to bed but the beavers were out there, working away.”
While Greydanus and her advisor, IRIS Director Brian Bledsoe, are still deciding on her thesis topic, her interest in beaver restoration may just win out.
“This summer was a really important step in gaining more context about how my thesis can plug into what Ducks Unlimited needs,” Greydanus said. “I’m really interested in the thresholds of how beavers choose where to build a dam and when to build a dam and all those questions. I wish I could interview a beaver! But I think my thesis could relate to how we mimic beaver dams and use logs in different ways. So it may be beaver related, or it may be kind of more general, on stream geomorphology.”
For the fall semester, Greydanus took a trip to Fort Collins, Colorado, where she worked with another Ducks Unlimited team in the field. This spring she’s returned to Athens, where she’ll wrap up her degree very soon.
“I love traveling and seeing different parts of the country, and while physics thankfully is the same everywhere, the way the elements interact with vegetation and climate and people is so different. So I’m really excited to see how the southeast compares to the Pacific Northwest here and then how that compares to the Rocky Mountains,” said Greydanus of the coming trip.
The west coast is her original stomping grounds–Greydanus grew up in California and Oregon–and she attributes the vast natural resources she was surrounded with as part of the reason she ended up in the field of natural infrastructure engineering.
“I grew up surrounded by plentiful fresh water and lots of forests and spent my free time outside–I think that’s a common thread with a lot of people that I’m in school with right now is we each had a third place, not home, not work. But the place that you go when you have some free time, whether that’s the beach or mountains or creek. We had a little creek down the road from where I lived.”
However, it wasn’t until Greydanus reached college and took a course on stream restoration as part of her civil engineering degree that she realized she could turn her interest in the natural world into a career.
After college, she returned to Northern California to work for a consulting firm doing fish passage, wetland restoration and tidal estuary work, which was how she first heard about the Institute for Resilient Infrastructure Systems, and her future advisor, Brian Bledsoe.
“A lot of my co-workers had my current advisor, Dr. Bledsoe, as their advisor. And they spoke really highly of him, so I started looking into the program at UGA, and went from there. It seemed like a good next step to try to learn more, to get some more tools in my toolkit.”
Interested in joining Greydanus and her fellow natural infrastructure engineers in training? Learn more about the Natural Infrastructure Fellowship.