Hello from Mississippi!

If you've been following along with the growing reach of Eyes on the Wild, you may have noticed that for a long time we've been sitting at 49 out of 50 US states contributing. As a result, whenever we give public talks about the project, we put out a plea to folks with connections to Mississippi. Eventually, word got passed along our collective network enough to fill in the last state on our map of the United States of America!! Below is a guest blog post from Isabella Burger, Master's student in Wildlife, Fisheries and Aquaculture at Mississippi State University. Along with Professor Garrett Street, Issi was instrumental in getting Mississippi classifications submitted!


Post from Isabella Burger, Master's student in Wildlife, Fisheries and Aquaculture at Mississippi State University.

During my undergraduate career, I was told time and time again that the global wildlife community is much smaller than I think. At the time, I didn’t believe it. I mean - that’s the entire world people were talking about! How can the community NOT be huge? However, as I progressed through my career and entered into my masters program, I realized that all of those people before were spot on. While I was in Belgium to present research, I ran into people from Washington D.C. In Cleveland, OH for a conference, I met up with a professor from New York that I hadn’t seen in three years. I had a contact from Africa write me a letter of recommendation for a scholarship three years after we last met.  These contacts, this community, is more tight-knit and outreaching than I ever expected when I entered the wildlife field.

Issi at work in the field!

This sense of community is what pushes the wildlife field forward. People in Mississippi working with people in Tanzania, with people in Wales, with people in China, making strides towards global scientific progress. This community is created by people and groups who make an effort to reach out to fellow professionals in an attempt to share and advance knowledge. Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve's Eyes on the Wild project is one of these groups. By encouraging participation from professionals and amateurs nationwide, Eyes on the Wild has found a way to not only further the sense of community among wildlifers, but also to speed up the process of wildlife identification for the creation of a Cedar Creek wildlife database.  Mississippi was the last of the 50 states to participate in this identification program, and we checked that box around a week ago. Our sense of community grows as more professionals feel motivated to participate and encourage participation in any and all forms of outreach and engagement.

Eyes on the Wild now has participants in ALL 50 states, thanks to Issi and the Mississippi State wildlife community!

As a student, projects like Eyes on the Wild are very beneficial to my professional development (just writing this blog post is a testament to that!). These projects give us as budding wildlife professionals the opportunity to make connections with other professionals as well as make a valuable contribution to the wildlife field as a whole. Once databases such as that in the work through Eyes on the Wild are developed, we can go back and see what we helped do. We will use these databases to further our own research, use as teaching tools in classes, and learn about the distribution of certain animals nationwide and globally. These opportunities are invaluable for wildlife professionals in general and wildlife students specifically. As these programs grow, so does the wildlife community - a community that is, as I have learned firsthand, much smaller and tight-knit than we all think.