Amanda Holland

Hi, I'm Amanda Holland of Lincoln.

I graduated from UNL in 2000 with a degree in fisheries and wildlife management and a minor in biology.

In my previous job as a wildlife biologist and GIS specialist with the Center for Advanced Land Management Information Technologies at UNL, I was doing resource management using geographic information systems (GIS), cutting-edge software that can be applied to natural resources. It’s a practical application of what I learned in the School of Natural Resources.

Since then, I’ve worked at the Institute of Ecosystems Studies in Millbrook, N.Y., in a rural area about 70 miles north of New York City. I will be looking at the dynamics of mammals, their communities and their relationship with Lyme disease ecology. I also will study how mammals affect tree seedling survival and forest composition. The small mammals eat the acorns, and that affects how many seedlings survive, but they also pass Lyme disease to the ticks. We’re going to be doing tick sampling to see how many are actually infected. The job will require field work as well as lab testing.

I’m hoping to go to graduate school soon, probably in New York and would like to study wildlife ecology with GIS applications.

My course work at the UNL School of Natural Resources prepared me very well for what I’m doing now and what I’ll be doing in Millbrook. One of my best experiences was taking summer courses at Cedar Point Biological Station near Ogallala. You do your course work, but you get to do it outside. I was able to get experience in the field. We would spend the morning in the field, before it got hot, and spend the afternoon in the classroom. Instead of just reading about someone else’s work, we got to go out and apply the same experiments, so it was easier to understand the concepts. The school also is good about offering field work near Lincoln during the school year.

My favorite course was mammalogy, naturally. I had a great advisor and a lot of great professors at UNL. I got a lot of work experience through them. I worked for a while in the biology department with one professor, and after I took some fisheries classes, I worked for 18 months for another doing fisheries research. In addition, every job I’ve had, even those unrelated to my major, I got through one of my professors. They tend to look out for you.