Cecil Konijnendijk Research Lab, UBC
For my first co-op work term, I have worked as Cecil Konijnendijk van den Bosch’s research assistant as part of the Urban Forestry Research Group at UBC. With guidance, I was given the opportunity to conduct my own research study, based off existing European research, which aimed to quantify and map the dimensional values held by community members of UBC’s greenspaces using GIS software. This has been an eye-opening experience, strengthening both my confidence and teaching me real world application of the knowledge I have gained so far in Urban Forestry. I also worked on the initial phase of the Campus Tree Inventory with five other students which aimed to map the health and wellbeing for every tree on campus using a both LiDAR data and ground-truthing methodology. This experience has gone above and beyond what I initially thought I would be doing on my first co-op work term and has given me the tools to contribute to meaningful projects that will continue to be utilized on-campus for years to come. Joining co-op strengthened my passion for Urban Forestry and opened doors to a future in research that I wish to pursue.
