This summer Malissa will be interning with the Center for Wildlife Studies (CWS) in order to collect data for her group master’s project. Malissa is working with advisors Dr. Jennifer Swenson and Dr. Krithi Karanth and teammates Liza Norment and Paul Gerlach. They will be using remote sensing techniques to create maps of the landcover types in and around protected areas in the Western Ghats. They will use these maps to conduct connectivity analyses for animal populations. Their work will aid future managers in protecting tigers and other large carnivores and their prey. This summer Malissa will be hiking outside the protected areas to collect on the ground data for map creation. She will be spending part of her time working in the CWS office in Bangalore and part of her time in the field collecting data.