Meet Alisa Hernandez. She spent the summer of 2021 working as the Natural Resources & Wildlife Biology intern at Cabrillo National Monument in San Diego, California, as part of the Latino Heritage Internship Program. Alisa worked with historic herpetofauna data to understand their population dynamics within the national monument. Herpetofauna consists of reptiles and amphibians.

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Nicole: Welcome to a new episode of Conservation Diaries, I’m Nicole Segnini, your host.

In this new National Park Service podcast series, we are showcasing some of the Latinx interns who are working on amazing projects with the National Park Service. There are several youth programs designed to connect kids, teens, and young adults with opportunities at national park sites to contribute to our nation’s natural, cultural, historical, and recreational resources in their own way. Like the Latino Heritage Internship Program, or LHIP.

Our guest today is Alisa Hernandez, from California. She is an undergraduate biology student at California State University.

Right now, she is still exploring what career path she wants to take after graduation, and this internship has provided her some guidance of possible paths. She has a passion for wildlife, conservation biology, and ecology.

Alisa: I like plants I like animals. So yeah, I’m still trying to figure it out. I just know something on dry land. And I think I am leaning to conservation; that really strikes a chord with me and it’s something I became passionate about. So, yeah, I'm just conserving resources, rare mammals—not mammals—rare animals, and just things that need our help that are being pushed out by people and they can't advocate for themselves.

Nicole: Over the summer Alisa worked as a wildlife biology and natural resources intern at Cabrillo National Monument. That is in Point Loma in San Diego, California, all the way at the southwestern tip of the state.

The monument commemorates the landing of Juan Rodríguez Cabrillo at San Diego Bay in 1542. This event marked the first time a European expedition had set foot on what later became the West Coast of the United States. In addition to telling the story of 16th-century exploration, the park is home to a wealth of cultural and natural resources.

Alisa’s work at the park consisted of researching the herpetofauna community at the park. That’s the reptiles and amphibians' community. The park has traps that have been up since 1995 and every season they go out there to collect data on the kinds of animals that get trapped. Each organism is measured and recorded for length, mass, sex, and approximate age before being released.

Alisa: So, they have this huge twenty-five-year data set that they gave me to work with. And I decided that I was interested in looking at climate factors like temperature, humidity, precipitation, to see if there's any relationship between those changing factors and the herpetofauna community, seeing that climate change is a very real and evolving problem.

If there was some kind of impact on these species that are essentially on what's basically an island, because Point Loma is a really small area of San Diego. It's a peninsula that sticks out the mainland, so there's water on three sides of it, and then on the fourth side it's blocked off by urban land development.

So, all the animals that are on the peninsula can't really migrate out if they wanted to. So they're kind of stuck there. So, it's like this really closed off environment. And I was curious if there is a relationship between climate and how they're doing.

Nicole: The data was collected by the NPS and U. S. Geological Survey agencies. She did a lot of coding, statistics, and modeling on the computer to find a relationship between climate and the herpetofauna community, but she told me she had a lot of busts. She said there wasn’t a lot of relationships between the data for temperature and precipitation. But there was something else she did find.

Alisa: But I found the humidity actually ended up being a pretty good predictor for two different species of lizards, the side side-blotched lizard and orange throated whiptail lizard. So, my models showed a negative relationship between them and humidity. So, it can be predicted that as humidity increases, the amount of those lizards seen would decrease. Which is interesting because a climate change-type idea is that it gets drier than it already is. So, we might see that these would increase and be kind of favored or winners in a drier environment. But that makes you wonder what's happening with the other lizards and reptiles in the community: are they going to be pushed out, outcompeted? Because a lot of these lizards eat the same kind of things as the other species. So, it's kind of an interesting relationship to see how is that going to play out in the future as things do get hotter and drier in this little urban island.

Nicole: The work Alisa did over the summer will be used to help guide future projects at the park. Right now, the park is working on a plan to re-introduce a locally extinct species of lizard called the coastal horned lizard. Knowing the kind of population dynamics can help the park consider possible impacts when making management decisions, such as planning a new trail.

Now, with parks and recreational areas there is so much human interaction with the environment. And while this is great, it also comes with the risk that not every interaction is going to be ideal.

That is why Alisa says it is important to understand the populations of animals and plants within parks so that when people get more introduced to that area, we can see how the population is reacting and how we can make sure they are safe.

Alisa: I know a lot of people wish they could take, like, their dogs on trails. But if you think about it, a dog is very similar smelling, looking, acting to like a wolf or a coyote. And a lot of smaller animals when they see that, they're like, oh no, I need to get away from here. And if they were hungry and they almost had food waiting for them, but your dog walked by and now it smells and reeks of predator and that animal then starves because they have to run away. it's not good. And if that's the only one of five individuals in that whole area, that's really not good for the population. So it's just, you know, it can be a cascading effect from people's interactions with these areas, both good and bad. So knowing how it is before can help you react to and improve upon it so that it can stay a healthy environment for both people and the organisms already living there.

Nicole: Alisa also spoke about why she feels is important to encourage the Latinx youth, that are interested in the STEM field, to actually pursue those careers.

She says it’s difficult to find people that look like her, who are Latinx, that are in the field of wildlife biology. And she wants to change that.

Alisa: I know I would be ecstatic to meet someone from a similar background who would be like ‘look I made it, I did it, and you can too!’ like that’s amazing to me.

I think it's cool when I get to meet, like especially at Cabrillo, young children who are like, oh, what are you doing? And I'm like, oh, I'm doing this lizard research. And they're like, that's so cool. People don't even know that you do that. I think it's important that there's like more opportunity for diversity in this field. Conservation is so important for everyone. Anyone who's living on this planet of ours and getting more people involved and more people educated about it, I feel like it's just so important. And I feel like a lot of kids like me didn't even have that opportunity to get that experience. So I think it's important to, like, introduce as many people to it as we can and help people understand it's important so that they can share it with everyone else they know. And then who knows? There might be more kids like me who are really interested in working outside and taking care of these animals, but they just didn't know that was an option.

Nicole: Alisa told me she was very thankful to have been able to work at Cabrillo where she says her supervisors and fellow employees were so supportive and welcoming of her and diversity as a whole.

She also spoke about the importance of trying to find something you are passionate about and being able to make a career out of it.

Programs like the Latino Heritage Internship Program can help young adults jumpstart their careers in the conservation field and with the National Park Service.

Alisa: Seeing something that's like Latino- or Hispanic-focused made me feel like I was already included. Like I didn't have to prove that I wanted to be there, like they were there because they wanted people like me and I was like, cool. It was cool to be wanted before you got there. And then you could see all these cool things that you could do. Programs like these are vital for that inclusion, I feel like.

Nicole: You can learn more about Cabrillo National Monument, its history and wildlife and plant populations, including the types of lizards Alisa was researching, by going on the park’s website at www.nps.gov/cabr.

And remember, there are many opportunities for youth and young adults 15-30 years old and veterans 35 years old and younger to work with the National Park Service.

To learn more about these jobs, internships, and volunteering opportunities, you can go to www.nps.gov/subjects/youthprograms.

Thanks for listening!

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