Student teams at Glacier National Park: webcams, dark skies and a pandemic pivot

Worcester Polytechnic Institute (WPI) juniors usually spend eight weeks off campus on a research project, and Glacier National Park has been one of the project sites since 2018. A National Park Service article describes what the teams do there and how the 2020 teams, kept home by COVID-19, still delivered.

The program

As part of the standard WPI curriculum, juniors complete an Interactive Qualifying Project (IQP), an interdisciplinary team research experience at one of more than 50 project centers around the world. The aim is for almost all students to go off campus. A WPI professor started a center at Acadia National Park's Schoodic Education and Research Learning Center in 2010, and it was a hit, so the professor sought other national parks with research learning centers and reached out to the director of the Crown of the Continent Research Learning Center at Glacier.

The park's leadership team picks suitable projects, the professor advertises them to students in the fall, and teams form around interest and experience. After winter and spring preparation and a summer break, students go to the project site for two months.

Starting at Glacier

The first group arrived in 2018, when the Howe Ridge Fire had West Glacier under an evacuation warning. The students spent their first month trying out their projects at Acadia and reached Glacier a month later, once the danger had passed. In 2019, 24 students came for a full eight-week term, and the research center's director saw that the more park staff help shape a project, the better the result.

The projects

Many projects concern congestion and visitor management, which the director called one of the park's biggest issues in recent years. Examples:

• Webcams linked to cellular antennas to monitor traffic congestion in parking lots and pullouts along the Going-to-the-Sun Road. After seeing the price of webcams, a 2019 team built its own for a fraction of the cost.
• A mobile app that tracks visitor movements around the park.
• A noise analysis study.
• A parking reservation system.
• Not all are about visitors: one 2020 team helped finish the annual report that the International Dark Sky Association requires of the park as a Provisional Dark Sky Park.

The 2020 pivot

The 2020 teams received their assignments in December 2019 and began planning as usual. Their spring term began in mid-March, just as COVID-19 became a full-blown pandemic and campus shut down. By July the decision was final: no student would travel off campus for a project, though Glacier fieldwork would normally run from August to October. Teams that had written in-person methods had to rework them.

• A waste-audit team had planned to sort through dumpsters in protective gear. It shifted to informing visitors about sustainability and reducing waste going into the park.
• A team updating the seasonal employee orientation lost its park contact, who was reassigned to the pandemic incident command. It turned to improving a mandatory workplace safety video, now more relevant than ever.

The teams presented their final projects by video conference, and the professor said most projects were preserved, morale stayed high and the park's feedback was great.

Sources

• National Park Service, "Turning Obstacles into Opportunities" (nps.gov article on Worcester Polytechnic Institute student projects at Glacier National Park); the article's photographs, mostly of students and their professor, and the names of its students are left out; rewritten in hubnx's own words.