June 1, 2020
By Kayla Wandsnider, Coastal Resilience Project Assistant, Wisconsin Sea Grant
Please welcome Kayla Wandsnider to the Southeastern Wisconsin Coastal Resilience Team as a project assistant! She officially started with the WI Sea Grant Institute in the Fall of 2019 working on Green Infrastructure (GI) in Green Bay. Since taking over the position from the recently graduated Lydia Salus (Congratulations!), she is splitting her time 50-50 with the SE WI Coastal Resilience project and the Green Infrastructure program.
Kayla is a double master’s candidate in the Urban and Regional Planning (Dec. 2020) and Water Resource Management (May 2021) programs. She has a Bachelor of Science in Biology with minors in Environmental Studies and Spanish from the University of Wisconsin – La Crosse. She also has a graduate certificate in GIS from the University of Denver. While working on the GI project in Green Bay, she has been able to hone her GIS skills using GeoPlanner and ArcGIS to identify locations for GI in Green Bay to help with their chronic flooding issues. She has also created a template to assist Green Bay in planning and assessing the impacts of new GI projects in addition to a survey to collect a GI inventory. Much of this project is based on her outreach and continued collaboration with stakeholders in Green Bay.
Between her undergraduate and graduate degrees Kayla worked at a wetland ecocenter in Utah as an education camp lead, as a field technician at the Idaho Department of Fish and Game studying the effects of recreation on wildlife, and as a pharmacy technician in Colorado. She is thrilled to be able to focus her experiences on the SE WI Coastal Resilience project. She is excited to work at the intersection between education and science targeting public outreach and influencing sustainable management decisions. We are hopeful that she will bring her geospatial and design skills to the project. Kayla will be working with the team, Adam Bechle, David Hart, Julia Noordyk, and Deidre Peroff to increase the web presence and facilitate public outreach.