‘What is my watershed address?’ GIS & Education Internship

Friends of the North Fork seeks a GIS- and education-focused intern for the summer of 2021 to continue to  develop our  ‘What is My Watershed Address?’ tool, develop user guides for school students and landowners, and assist our Program Coordinator with outreach plans and the tool’s launch.

Internship Goals: Improve functionality of this GIS mapping tool (relating to watershed impacts and awareness, education, and land-use decision-making); develop two user guides geared toward students and landowners and outreach; assist FNFSR’s Program Coordinator with development of lesson plans/lectures to aid teachers, students and landowners/homeowners in use of GIS mapping tool.

Last year, Friends began developing a GIS-based tool for landowners/homeowners, students and teachers to help expand understanding of how we all have influence on the health and productivity of the watershed we live in.  Starting by focusing users on the concept of watershed addresses, we mean to guide residents of the North Fork watershed to better understand their positive and negative impacts on the watershed, and to begin to explore how we individually and collectively use the landscape.

What is a watershed address? While many people can tell you in a heartbeat what their home address is in relation to roads, cities and towns, few are aware that they have a  watershed address, what that means, or how knowing it can help them make a difference in local and regional water quality.  As a critical sub-watershed within the larger Chesapeake Bay watershed, the waters of the North Fork of the Shenandoah bear a number of ecological burdens from human activity within the Valley.  The goal of our watershed address tool is to help people—youth and adults alike within the Shenandoah Valley—connect their place on the map with their place on the landscape, their place within a collective watershed, and their role in preserving one of our most critical resources: water.  While 2020 saw the tool created and available for reference on the Friends of the North Fork website, there are important steps yet  to accomplish in order to launch the tool in its entirety, and this is where we’d love to get an intern involved.

We are looking for a student with a background in GIS, a keen interest in education, and solid writing/communication skills to work under the guidance of the Friends of the North Fork Program Coordinator to create educational programming and comprehensive user guides for the tool and to improve the navigability of the tool using GIS (ArcGIS is what it is based in at the moment). 

If you are interested in the position, please send your resumé/CV and a minimum of two writing samples (one with formal writing, one with less formal writing) to our program coordinator for more information about the position by no later than April 15.