Ashley Muench 
It is with great enthusiasm that we announce that our staff will be accompanied by Ashley Muench once again this summer! This year Ashley will be helping under the Cofrin Biodiversity Internship Program, funded by the Freshwater Collaborative of Wisconsin. This internship is in line with Ashley's other work and career prospects to this point, assessing water health and betterment within the Wisconsin watersheds. Through this program, students work to better understand the 10 Grand Water Challenges facing the state of Wisconsin. Ashley will be assisting staff in spearheading a new water quality testing protocol on not only our Willow Creek Preserve, but so too on our Hunner and Spring Preserves. Ashley's past experience in QA/QC and use of multipoint parameter testing equipment makes her the perfect fit for this role. We are beyond excited to have Miss Ashley back on the lands this year and giving her the opportunity to get more experience in the waters managed by GLC! If you see her on the land, give her a warm welcome and be sure to ask lots of questions!

In October of 2007, Ashley moved from the city of Fond du Lac to a house 10 minutes east in the countryside. Growing up, she spent any time she could with her parents and two sisters out on Lake Winnebago. Up until her move, she was not a nature person, but fishing, her family's new house, traveling, and her later educational experiences slowly changed that.
    Once Ashley could drive, she traveled to Kettle Moraine, Mauthe Lake, and as far as Colorado, Tennessee, Florida, and South Carolina. While those places had more to offer than their natural beauty, it was still a fixation of her interest.
    Ashley’s educational endeavors and watershed conservancy interests didn’t fully begin to unfold until her adult years. After high school graduation, she took a trip to Florida, and began college at the University of Wisconsin-Oshkosh to explore her interests. All it took was two environmental science classes to open Ashley’s eyes to the real crises that ecosystems face and to carve her career path. Once she graduated with her Associate's Degree of Arts and Sciences, she took a year and a half gap to travel to other states, and is now working on an Environmental Science degree at the University of Wisconsin-Green Bay.
    Today, aside from an internship with GLC, Ashley has been a passionate volunteer with Fox-Wolf Watershed Alliance for over 2 years. In just 2 years with Fox-Wolf Watershed Alliance, she has been a part of water quality monitoring, a winter salt watch, a restoration project, aquatic invasive species snapshot day, and site leading two years in a row for an annual watershed cleanup, guiding volunteers to clean up trash, which totaled to about 560 pounds of trash in those two years from her sites alone. She also has a summer research assistantship where she is in the field and in the lab with a QA/QC position, testing stream water quality in Manitowoc.
           If you told Ashley 10 years ago that she would be taking this path in life, she would’ve told you that you’re crazy. A girl who once was scared of snakes looks forward to catching snakes, being out in the field, and learning anything new nearly every day.
    Aside from her environmental interests, in Ashley’s free time, she likes to travel, cook and bake new recipes, spend time with her cats, go to the gym, and she’s known for her cake pops.