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UW students win top honors
in international range contests
Wyoming
University of Wyoming students returned to Laramie with two first place finishes and the top sweepstakes award in undergraduate competition at the recent 57th International Society for Range Management (SRM) gathering in Salt Lake City, Utah.
Senior Jordge Lafantasie, a rangeland ecology and watershed management major from Castle Rock, Colo., won first place in the undergraduate range management exam (URME), defeating 174 other students from throughout North America.
Lafantasie's combined scores on the URME test and the plant identification contest qualify her as the sweepstakes winner and entitle her to a trip to Washington, D.C., to meet with federal officials representing the U.S. Forest Service, the Bureau of Land Management and the National Resources Conservation Service.
UW senior Rachel Shorma of Rock Springs won first place out of 24 students in the range speaking contest for her talk on the inhibition of growth in one species of plants by chemicals produced by another species. UW Senior Fred Cummings of Wheat Ridge, Colo., took eighth place for his discussion of the effects of fire on range ecology. The students were given five minutes to select a topic from three choices and then two hours to prepare their speeches. They were also required to answer questions from a panel of range professionals.
The two-hour written URME exam won by Lafantasie combined 263 multiple choice and problem questions dealing with topics pertaining to ecology. "It mostly covered what we learn in our classes," she reports, although study materials were suggested before the competition.
The UW URME team as a whole finished in second place out of 18 teams, scoring just behind the winning University of Alberta. Team members in addition to Lafantasie include Cummings; senior Nate Jorgenson of Mound, Minn.; senior Todd Schlegel of Burns, Colo.; senior Phil Lockwood of Kemmerer; senior Kyle Hagerty of Navato, Calif.; junior Ross Cuny of Buffalo Gap, S.D.; and seniors Aaron Zobell and Teven Thomas and juniors Matt Scott and Jocelyn Johnson of Laramie.
Lafantasie finished 13th out of 123 contestants on the plant identification exam. Participants were required to identify small samples of 100 different North American rangeland species and were given one minute to look at each one. Other UW students who competed in the event include Zobell, Johnson, Shorma, junior Chris Sheer of Lagrange and Casey Quitmeyer of Lexington, Ky. The UW team finished ninth out of 23 teams, with top honors going to students from Mexico.
In addition to participating in the contests, Lafantasie also presented a paper to attendees at the international SRM meeting on "Vegetation Changes with the Release of Coalbed Methane Discharge." Although she will not complete her undergraduate degree until May 2004, she has already begun research on this topic for her master's work.
Lafantasie encourages other students to become involved in the competitions. "It provides a trip to the society meetings, which I think are pretty important for networking and meeting people in the field," she says. "It is helpful to talk to people in different agencies and to find out what their jobs are like. Also, the various sessions show what kind of research people are doing."
Date: 2/11/04
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