Hi friends, my name is Madison Molter! I grew up on the eastern shore of Maryland living within and exploring the wetlands of the Chesapeake Bay watershed. It was there where my love of reptiles and amphibians was born. To pursue this love as a career I attended Colorado State University to major in Fish, Wildlife, and Conservation Biology and minor in Zoology.

While at CSU I became involved in the Society for Conservation Biology as the treasurer and later president of the organization. Our club worked closely with The Nature Conservancy to do riparian restoration projects on privately-owned conservation easement ranches. Simultaneously, I began volunteering for Wildland Restoration Volunteers and the Northern Colorado Reptile Humane Society. Through these extracurriculars I was able to develop skills in both conservation and herpetology. I became familiar with a wide range of skills from animal care and environmental education to chainsaw-use and invasive species removal.

Throughout undergrad I worked for my university as a Recruitment Ambassador for the Warner College of Natural Resources. This allowed me to harness my leadership, communication, and public-speaking skills, build connections with administration, and foster community within my group of peers. I built upon these skills during a summer position at Killens Pond State Park where I took care of the reptiles, amphibians, and fish housed at our nature center, and lead education programs about native wildlife.

In my senior year I decided to combine all of these interests for my honors thesis research and chose to look at and map the range reduction of Southern Hognose snakes across South Carolina as a result of ecological change in the 20 and 21st centuries. Through this project I discovered my passion for GIS and truly saw the importance of herptile conservation. This also served as my formal introduction to the conservation research process.

After graduation from CSU in the Spring of 2021 I moved to North Carolina and started at the City of Raleigh working to restore urban natural areas by performing habitat management, invasives removal, native plantings, and beatification. Then, I got offered a research assistant position at Archbold Biological Station in south-central Florida. There I was on a small team looking at the effectiveness of Gopher Tortoise translocation by studying population dynamics and disease transmission at a relocation site in Highlands County. There I became familiar with line-transect surveys, multiple forms of wildlife trapping, morphometric measurements, and radiotelemetry.

After that position ended in July 2022, I went back to Colorado for a few months to serve as the Recruitment and Engagement Coordinator for Warner College. This position allowed to me reconnect with my education and communication roots while also trying my hand at supervising and team-management. It was great to return to my alma mater for a short-while, but I was ecstatic to come back to Florida at the start of 2023 to begin my internship here at St Marks!

I said all throughout college that salamanders were my dream species to work with, and here I am finally with an opportunity to work with them! Working for a federal agency is also such a wonderful opportunity to gain insight into a whole new side of conservation and research that I have yet to be apart of. And though amphibians are my true love, I am equally as excited for a chance to work with the Red-cockaded Woodpeckers, white-tail deer management, waterfowl impoundments, and all the other projects going on at St. Marks. I feel fortunate for the opportunity to gain such a broad range of skills across multiple different species. Wherever I end up next, I know that the knowledge gained here during this internship will support and encourage those endeavors.