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The July heat is already oppressive by 7 a.m., when Stella Cunningham ’21 arrives at a site on the banks of Waller Creek in downtown Austin. As rush-hour traffic hums in the background, she walks along the water’s edge, using a handheld device to collect data about the air quality.

After five minutes, Cunningham climbs up to street level, where the city noise is much louder, and repeats the walk in the other direction. She pauses to make sure the data has synched with an app on her smartphone, then heads several blocks north to her next site.

Cunningham’s morning walks are part of her eight-week summer internship with the Nature Conservancy, funded through the Institute for Interdisciplinary Science (i4) at St. Edward’s. The institute was established by a five-year, $1.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation’s Improving Undergraduate STEM Education: Hispanic-Serving Institutions (HSI) Program. 

Urban ecologists in the Austin office of the Nature Conservancy are studying the effects of multiple efforts to reintegrate nature throughout the Waller Creek watershed. The creek winds through residential neighborhoods, The University of Texas at Austin, and an urban waterway that winds through downtown before joining Lady Bird Lake. Cunningham and her four teammates collect data about air quality, plants and wildlife along the creek to track and measure changes in this urban ecosystem over time.

Each morning between 7 and 9 a.m., Cunningham visits four sites along the creek to take air-quality measurements along the creek and on an adjacent roadway, so her team can compare the two. She then meets up with her colleagues for the day’s field research, which includes bird counts and surveys of the vegetation and trees along the creek. The students also check wildlife cameras that capture images of animals using the creek — raccoons, possums, birds — and the occasional person.

During one survey, Cunningham’s team encountered someone living in a camp in the creek bed. “Those interactions opened my eyes to different ways people are using the creek, but also to different aspects of city life,” she says. “As a student at St. Edward’s, the social justice dimensions of homelessness are always on my mind.”

Cunningham got interested in fieldwork during a weeklong research experience the summer after her freshman year, when she did vegetation surveys at a park in northwest Austin. A Mathematics major, she is considering a career in data science, which develops methods to analyze large datasets like those generated in environmental field research. 

Her team this summer includes environmental science majors from the University of Texas and high school students interning with the Austin Parks and Recreation Department. Cunningham says one of her biggest takeaways is learning how to work with colleagues from different backgrounds. “Being able to use their expertise and collaborate on a diverse team was a great opportunity — not just to learn about myself, but to learn how to work with other people,” she says.

Photography by Chelsea Purgahn