Alumni Profile: Caroline Booth
Caroline Booth graduated with a B.S. in Ecology and Environmental Sciences, with a concentration in forest ecosystems, in May 2019. During her time at UMaine, she was involved in a diverse array of extracurricular opportunities and academic research.
As a freshman, Caroline was a part of Blue for Peru, a campus service trip organization, which plans trips to third world countries to do volunteer work. The funds for the trip are raised by group members. While in Peru, they helped a local community along the Amazon River by installing water filtration systems, providing medical and school supplies, and teaching English to local children.
For the last three years of her college career, she was a playing member of the University of Maine’s Women’s Rugby Team. Caroline gained an appreciation for rugby culture, and also made friendships with people all over New England and Canada.
As a Land and Sea Grant University, UMaine provides a multitude of opportunities for students to get involved in research, and EES students are especially encouraged to get involved as early as possible. Caroline participated in research by working with Zachary Wood, then an EES Ph.D. student. Wood’s research focused on the morphological and evolutionary changes of invasive Mosquitofish. Caroline used the skills in geographical information systems (GIS) that she gained through her EES coursework to conduct a spatial analysis that examined the relationship between Mosquitofish morphology and the amount of human development in the surrounding area.
Their work has been invited for submission to a special issue in the journal Evolutionary Applications. Zach also presented their work in an urban ecology session at the Canadian Society for Ecology and Evolution meeting in New Brunswick this August.
Caroline expressed her gratitude and thanks to the research team saying, “Zach was and continues to be an exemplary mentor for me in the field of evolution, education, and biology. The opportunity I was given to collaborate with Zach, as well as many other team members, allowed me to take my experience and passion for engineering and the environment and apply the ideas of urbanization management and ecological changes into active research.”
After graduation, Caroline began working as an Environmental Specialist at Beals and Thomas, Inc., a Southborough, Massachusetts engineering consultant firm. This multidisciplinary business provides a wide variety of services from civil engineering, landscape architects, land surveyors, planners, and environmental specialists. She works on planning and permits for a wide range of projects. This allows her to learn more about the engineering and legal side of the industry while still applying her GIS and environmental knowledge.