Mira Sachs

Seniors Adelina Mbise and Audrey Dickinson won third place out of 32 teams in a forestry challenge in the Santa Cruz mountains from Oct. 8–11.
According to the Forestry Challenge website, a forestry challenge is an academic event for high school students to participate in technical forestry and current forestry topics. Participants spend a few days in the forest learning about the ecology and management of forested landscapes.
“They teach you about forestry skills, and then you use those forestry skills to make a presentation, and take a test, and then that’s how they determine where you place,” Dickinson said.
Senior Adelina Mbise said there was no internet up in the mountains, so they had to get their information from interviews and paper packets. They showcased their presentations on the last day to a panel of professional foresters.
“On the last day, we finally presented our presentations. And I think we did really well on that,” Mbise said.
A big part of the research they did was data collection from Buchanan State Park, which was recently burned by the Cal Fire Santa Cruz unit lightning complex fires.
“We studied how the fire affected the area. We were collecting data on the health of the trees,” Mbise said.
Teams are formed by students who come from lots of different schools. This year, the team from Piedmont had the smallest team, with two people on it.
“Sometimes I think schools had up to ten people and they’d be split into two teams,” Dickinson said.
This was Mbise and Dickinson’s first time competing in a challenge like this. Mbise said she signed up because she really likes different kinds of field and natural sciences.
“I’m interested in a lot of different types of biology, and I think ecology is pretty cool. I’m just trying to put myself out there a little more,” Dickinson said.
This is not the first time that a team from Piedmont has competed in the forestry challenge and advanced, but it is the smallest team that has competed in the competition.
“This is the third year that Piedmont’s competed. And we’ve been the smallest team,” Mbise said.
Because the team got third place, they will be moving to the championships in April in the Sierra Nevada mountain range.
“They’re gonna let us bring one other person because we’re a really small team,” Dickinson said.
Mbise said that it was a fulfilling experience and that she learned a lot from the challenge.
“We did not expect to do as well as we did. And it was really, really cool,” Dickinson said.