By John Pirrung [jap448]
Hello Readers,
Apologies for the significant gap between the previous blog post and this one. I have been traveling and tackling several different parts of the project, but thankfully everything is working out well. To cover the past few weeks:
- We have finalized the content on the website and are actively working to publish it
- We have made multiple versions of our fact sheets (full and abridged versions) and sent them out to a few different local newsletters
- We are finishing up a poster that discusses the project and encourages growers to involve themselves in identifying and reporting invasive species; we’re hoping to print it out and display it at the county fair and other events
- We have created another survey for growers to discuss their weed management strategies which is being distributed as a QR code on the poster and will likely be sent out to mailing lists
All of these different facets of the project have been in development simultaneously, and each is at a different level of completion, however with this being my final week of the internship I’m aiming to complete as many parts as I can. The website can hopefully be checked off before the end of the week, as once it’s published it’ll be live and anyone can visit the page (feel free to check it out at https://cals.cornell.edu/weed-science/weeds-climate-change). The fact sheets are organized by commodity; the soy sheets are completely done, however the corn and forage sheets still need some polishing to ensure they are consistent with the others. The poster is essentially done, however we’re experimenting with the font size and overall readability while we figure out how/where we’ll be printing it. The survey is published and complete, so all that has to be done with it is share the link via the poster and other means. This internship has certainly been testing me on how to manage multiple projects at once, but with some solid organization (and some help from flexible deadlines) I believe I’ve been able to deliver as promised.
I’ll aim to make one more blog post after the internship is concluded so that I can give some final updates and share some more of our content, and I’ll be doing a short presentation of my work on September 10th at Cornell where I’ll be able to truly bring everything together.