>> My name is John Frank and
I'm an Electrical Engineer
with the Rocky Mountain Research Station.
[Background Music] So I work at the field site,
the Glacier Lakes Ecosystem Experiments Site --
we call it GLEES -- and we have a carbon
tower and there we're studying the exchange
between carbon and water between the
forest ecosystem and the atmosphere.
So we were up there detecting
basically how the trees breathe in
and out water throughout a beetle epidemic and
it was pretty fascinating to watch them die.
When they are initially attacked you
can see the bark beetles come through
and basically put the trees into severe
drought stress and so they can't move water.
After a couple of years the trees
die and it was pretty fascinating.
You can see the carbon sink just pelmet.
Our forests over a course of a few years changed
from being a carbon sink to being carbon neutral
to all from anything being a carbon source
so that has you know major implications
for things like climate change.
It's not often that you get
to go work at a field site
at a high elevation every
week for your entire career.
It's pretty fascinating.
There's a certain amount of adventure to it.
The Forest Service called and needed someone
with my skill set and I had kind of a moment
where I had to decide what I
wanted to do for my career.
And I just decided I wanted to do
the job that would get me to --
wake me up in the morning and that's what
ultimately brought me to the Forest Service.
I know that most electrical engineering jobs
would be in a laboratory or behind a computer
and this would be an opportunity to
do electrical engineering outdoors.
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