During the summer season of 2019 Rowen Monks, a Canada Summer Jobs Student, worked as a research technician at the Cedar Coast Field Station.

Rowen loves kelp. When she snorkels by, she loves the way kelp grazes her ankle with a kind of forwardness usually depicted at Friday night port town karaoke. Rowen has always been fond of abyssal spaces. This love arose from growing up as a wee pleb roaming the derelict streets of East Vancouver. She found peace in the unwavering, rhythmic swash of traffic, BC transit and industrial noise which remind her now of unending tides. The lightless nooks in East Hastings alleyways that harboured so much macro and microbial life, despite the inhospitable gloom, were a gateway of love to the not dissimilar hydrothermal vents in the great abyssal plains of the Pacific. Now she collects and processes data for the sea lice monitoring program. Besides this main role at Cedar Coast, she finds time to document spawning habitat for amphibians and forage fish on Vargas Island. Rowen is generally enthusiastic. She is especially enthusiastic about Cedar Coast’s role in monitoring the ecosystems of Clayoquot Sound. Having been inspired by the many go-getters of Cedar Coast, she has decided to completely reroute her career to pursue kelp farming.