 I'm Travis Belote with the Wilderness Society in Bozeman, Montana, the town that was brought up as being really white earlier today, and I can attest to that. I'm here to talk to you about my involvement with the Ecology Plus program and how we use remote internships and some of what we learned from that process. So a little bit about Ecology Plus, it's actually an NSF-includes program, supported program led by Theresa Maraud at Ecological Site of America and George Middendorf at Howard who are both the peak OPIs on this project, and it's really meant to bring together a collective of organizations and a cohort of students to work on these things, so mentor and networking, sort of entering career pathways, access to opportunities, and overcoming and identifying institutional barriers, and so when I first approached Theresa about how we could potentially work together, we came up with this idea of remote internship, and so remote internships is a way of making opportunities more accessible to different people, and so I'm in Bozeman, which is on the in the west there, and the students, the cohort of students were recruited from the Baltimore DC area, and so how can we give an opportunity to do ecological research in this remote internship setting. We focused on, I mean the reason I think I'm here is that we focus on data science, and so the fact that you can use spatial data in GIS, and it's available, widely available for lots of different qualities and metrics, be it biophysical or cultural or other, to focus on that being the way that we do the remote internships, focus on doing data science, so we learned things like just basic scientific process, asking questions, formula hypotheses, collecting the data, analyzing it, doing summaries, data display, making maps, and then telling the story, and so through this we felt like these were transferable skills of working with data, working with GIS, no matter whether the students go into ecology or some other field, these were transferable skills that would be useful to them in their careers. One of the things, so the three things we learned, so this is kind of the clickbait, like the three things we learned, although I just learned another one at lunch that I want to make sure I get to, is that even though remote is sort of, that was the point of the project, is to do remote internships where, with the idea of making these opportunities accessible to more people, it's invaluable to have time together, and so the three students, Ed and we'll be speaking next, came out to Montana, we spent a 14 or 15 hour day in Yellowstone doing the whole figure eight loop road, getting to know each other and doing training, understanding each other, you know, just sort of getting to know each other was the biggest part, but we also did a lot of just training and coming up with the formula and the questions, downloading data sets, getting our feet wet with things. This was a really long week for everybody, but it was awesome. The other thing, so spend time together and then make sure you have good software and good ways of doing screen shares, and I'm, you know, for those of you that are savvy, this is probably an easy thing, but if you work for an organization, you need to make sure that they're committed to providing resources to doing, and I know that a lot of these things are free Google Hangouts and those sorts of things, but if you need to buy the $500 team viewer subscription, things like that, invest in this sort of ability to screen share, whether it's the students sharing the screen with you, are you sharing the screen with them and letting them watch you code or watch you click around in GIS, that is invaluable for being able to not only have face to face time through remote internship, but also just doing shadowing and sharing screens and taking turns on that. That's been super helpful, and so figuring that out early is really important. And then make sure there are stakes in the game. So both from the mentor perspective and the student perspective, having a deliverable that you're both accountable for is really important. So you can't just say, oh, we're going to do remote internship. We'll meet once a month or once every two weeks and learn some stuff. We had early on, we said, okay, I'm flying back to DC and you all are going to give presentations to my staff in the organization. We're going to open up as a webinar to everybody in the organization and with Ecology Plus, and you're going to present what you've worked on, and I think that was a really important thing that we did is to have accountability and something to show for the work that we've done, because otherwise, I'm busy, they're busy taking classes and it would be too easily, sort of easily go to the last thing on your list to do in the week. So having accountability is really important. The thing that we talked about at lunch that we didn't do, which I would add to this, is have a debrief. We never debrief. We never sort of got together and said, what worked well? What didn't work well? How could I have been better? What could we have done to make the process better? We didn't do that. We identified it just about an hour ago at lunch. I wish we'd have done. So there's my fourth thing and thank you for your time. Thanks for having me. This is a huge honor to be here.