Elizabeth Camarata, a Biological Technician with the United States Forest Service, leads herself and two other female scientists down the Alaganik Slough on the Copper River Delta. The skiff cruise into the delta is the first step in a series of obstacles that these women must take to find their study pond.

After a long day of trudging through bogs and collecting data, the women grab a snack and share some laughs before making the four mile trudge back to the forest service skiff.

Looking forward, Camarata hoped to go to graduate school at Oregon State University. Since our time together, she has started her pursuing her master’s degree in Horticulture at Oregon State University in Corvallis.

Camarata is an essential player in the Elodea Project, and she often stepped up to lead when confusion arose, showing the team, where and how things were to be done. To dig through the myriad of plant life in the wetland, Camarata must break up the roots using a chainsaw prior to inserting a barrier that will be placed around the study pond.

In the field, women can sometimes experience discrimination, or face colleagues who believe they are not capable to perform the ‘“dirty work.” To that Camarata says, “It’s not only the yes I can shoot a deer, and I can gut a fish, and I can hike that mountain and carry a gun, whatever. I’m gonna show you that I can do it. You see more women lately, maybe younger women, saying I don’t have to prove this to you because I know that I can do it, because all of these other women have showed me I can do it.”

The Copper River Delta ecosystem is the largest wetland complex on North America’s Pacific Coast. It is home to a diverse set of plant life, and a popular nesting ground for hundreds of waterfowl and shorebird species.

The team uses pack rafts to weave their way through the delta. These inflatable rafts act as handy bridges between ponds, while also keeping the women and their equipment dry. Here, Camarata and her colleague, Amelia McReynolds, tow the raft back and forth to cross.

Camarata, McReynolds, and Jillian Jablonski make sure they are well prepped before the conduct their surveys. While Camarata studies the presence of invasive species on the pond, Jablonski will conduct a bird survey, and McReynolds will take water samples to test the pond’s acidity levels.

Camarata, who has lived and worked all over the lower forty-eight, has valued to her time in Alaska for pushing her to new extremes. On a day off surveying, we took a hike up Sheridan Mountain and talked about what the future looked like for the both of us.

In preparation for a study Camarata is conducting on an invasive plant species, known as Elodea, she carefully hangs on the edge of a pack raft, creating a study sample square in the team’s pond of interest.

Cottonwood plants rustle in the breeze on a rare, sunshine filled day in the Delta. A sea of these plants make the outskirts of the ponds look like they are covered in a dusting of snow.

During a work break, I caught Camarata snuggling her face in bundle of cottonwoods. As a biological technician who specials in botany, Camarata loves to identify and enjoy various plant species in the pond. Part of the reason why she loves the area is for it’s biodiversity.

Camarata gears up for a long day of manual labor, where the USFS staff will work on building a plastic barrier around a pond that will become a study site of the invasive species, Elodea.