Internship in grassland habitat inventory and management

Latvian Fund for Nature offers a unique internship position for natural sciences Bachelor student interested in working with grassland habitat inventories and management. You will have an opportunity to participate in the project GrassLIFE, which is a nation-wide grassland restoration project, dealing with EU priority grassland habitats.

Interns will be provided with the initial training in plant identification upon starting the internship and afterwards tasked with independent work under a supervision of an experienced grassland habitat expert. The main scope will be to participate in the monitoring and evaluation of semi-natural grassland restoration success in project GrassLIFE. The work will involve extensive fieldwork, working outdoors in various weather conditions, and participation in practical management and restoration activities in the field (removal of invasive species, seed collection e.t.c.). We will provide interns with means of transport and will cover the transport and accommodation costs while working in the field (if those costs would not be covered by Erasmus or other scholarship).

We offer a unique opportunity to participate in the hands-on habitat management and restoration work, and become a part of a grassland restoration and management team. You will acquire practical skills in grassland plant species and habitat identification, habitat management planning and monitoring.

Detailed description of main tasks:

Task 1: fieldwork in grassland habitat monitoring
(temporal frame: 2-4 days a week during the fieldwork season – end of May-July)
Intern duties will focus primarily on assisting in the field surveys in after-restoration monitoring: counts of plant species cover in permanent and semi-permanent plots (standard methodology for vegetation description) and description of vegetation structure according to the EU habitat mapping methodology of Latvia.

Task 2: fieldwork with habitat restoration and removal of invasive species
(temporal frame: 2-4 days a week in early May)
Intern duties will focus on assisting in the practical field works for sward management in experimental plots (grass cutting, weeding), removal of invasive species, collecting of grassland biomass samples etc.

Possible additional tasks:

3. Assisting in the field surveys in urban meadow monitoring.
4. Fieldwork with collecting seeds in grasslands.
5. Data entry in the database (office work).