Bureau of Land Management & UConn Biodiversity Internship, Summer 2026

Every summer, The Bill Lane Center for the American West offers many opportunities for Stanford undergraduates (including graduating seniors and co-terms) to work with organizations throughout the West. Through these internships, students can explore careers in natural history, conservation, land use, museum curation, resource management, energy and more.

All internships are full-time for nine to ten weeks during the summer. They are fully funded by the Lane Center with stipends ranging from $7,500 to $10,000.

The Lane Center has placed hundreds of interns in positions across the West since 2005. It has developed strong relationships with host organizations and works hard to ensure interns have successful and enriching experiences.

For more information about the internship program, please visit the FAQs page, or email Education Manager Corinne Thomas.

Details about previous summer student interns and their placements can be found here.

Student reflections about the internship experience can be found by visiting the Out West student blog and the Lane Center Instagram channel.

Stipend Information:

The Bill Lane Center will provide a base stipend of $7,500 with additional funding for student financial aid and location, if applicable, up to $10,000. The stipend is provided to cover living expenses and, if applicable, part of the summer earnings expectation of the Office of Financial Aid.

The stipend is not intended to be, and is not, a paid, hourly wage. An internship is an educational and experiential learning opportunity intended for the student to apply their academics and gain real-world experience.

Description of the Organization: 

The Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology (EEB) at the University of Connecticut is a community dedicated to scientific discovery, innovation, and education of and about biodiversity. Our community is composed of people with diverse expertise, experiences, interests, values and beliefs, from many nations, ages, genders, sexual orientation, ability, and disparate economic, social, and ethnic backgrounds.

Internship Overview:

We are looking to employ a summer intern to sample caterpillars, moths, and tiger beetles in Idaho and other western states from the middle of June through at least mid-August. 

Primary goals will be to collect baseline surveys of insect populations using light trap samples; collect, raise, and photograph caterpillars; and census insects in globally imperiled ecosystems in SE Arizona. An important aspect of the caterpillar surveys will be to document tri-trophic interactions between caterpillars, their host plants, and parasitoids. 

The intern(s) will learn basic plant identification, insect collection and curation techniques, DNA barcoding (for caterpillar and parasitoid identification), insect macrophotography, and have an opportunity to interact with many entomologists, botanists, and wildlife biologists. 

Data from the survey will be used to inform conservation and land management decisions, yield baseline data on insect diversity, and contribute to ecological studies examining trophic specialization (diet breadths) and food web structures across latitudinal gradients. The caterpillar collections and images, a core focus of the research, will be used in a book on the Caterpillars of Western North America to be published by Princeton University Press.

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) and the Wagner lab are looking to carry out modern biotic inventories of some ecologically significant tracts in Idaho, SE Arizona, and other western states. Initial goals will be to conduct baseline surveys of caterpillars, moths, tiger beetles, and other insects. 

In addition to the project description above, much of the caterpillar and moth data will be used as the basis for species accounts for a book on the “Caterpillars of Western North America” to be published by Princeton University Press. Little work of this nature has been done in Idaho and other western states, and thus the intern can expect to make novel discoveries over the 9-10 weeks of their internship. 

The intern would be encouraged to spend 1 week at the end of the internship in Storrs, CT, prepping 95-190 specimens for DNA barcoding. The intern would enter metadata into a database, image the voucher specimens, collect tissue subsamples, and prepare 1 or 2 microplates for sequencing. This effort (and training) also would involve interpretation of the sequence data and generation of neighbor-joining identification trees. 

The intern would work in Dr. David Wagner’s lab in the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at UConn. Primary responsibilities of the intern will include the deployment and collection of blacklight traps, processing field collections, field pinning adult macrolepidopterans, caterpillar sampling with beating sheets, raising and photographing caterpillars.

Internship Work Environment:

This internship is in-person. There will be two to three hours of lab time for each hour of field time. But the husbandry and photography, because they are working with live animals and observing and recording behaviors, can feel like field time as it can be engaging and yield new discoveries.

We plan to anchor our surveys to the state of Idaho, but the team can expect to make brief forays into adjacent states (Oregon, Utah, and Washington). 

The latter half of July will be spent at Willcox Playa and the adjacent sky islands of SE Arizona. Circumstances allowing, we will try to squeeze in a visit to a University of California field station. 

The intern is also invited to spend up to a week at the Wagner Lab in September at the University of Connecticut to assist with DNA barcoding of the summer's specimens.

The intern will work as part of a small team. This will include a combination of outdoor and indoor work. 

Outdoor conditions will expose candidates to magnificent wildlands of the American West. There will also be challenges associated with working in a prairie/sagebrush as well as montane and desert ecosystems, including biting-insects, sun-exposure, and primitive road conditions. All candidates must be prepared to handle these challenges and maintain a positive attitude for the duration of the internship. The two previous Bill Lane interns regarded this position to be an exceptionally valuable, formative, engaging, demanding, immersive, and positive life experience.

Two summer interns will form the core team that will spend the summer together. Funding for the second intern will come from a Bureau of Land Management (BLM) grant as well as a grant administered through the University of Connecticut. 

Tanner Matson (post-doc at Smithsonian Museum/National Museum of Natural History) and Professor David Wagner will join the interns for two weeks at the beginning of the internship. Professor Wagner will also spend another 10 or more days with the interns in SE Arizona. At different points over the summer, the interns will be joined by BLM biologists, professors, botanists, and taxonomic experts.

Primary responsibilities of the intern(s) will include the deployment and collection of blacklight traps, processing field collections, field pinning adult macrolepidopterans, sight-censusing tiger beetle population numbers (through binoculars), caterpillar sampling with beating sheets, raising and photographing caterpillars, and assisting with the preparation of barcode plates that will be sent off for DNA sequencing. 

The intern would be collecting for a few hours a day; spend part of each day maintaining the living caterpillars and updating the associated field/rearing notes; photographing the living caterpillars; and processing the trap collections once a week. We would encourage the students to embrace posting on iNaturalist, so that their walks and collecting outings can immediately become part of their and the project's scientific legacy.

Housing Provided: We expect to stay at Bureau of Land Management bunkhouses in SW Idaho (to be covered by Wagner Lab grants); perhaps one week of housing at a UC Field Station; and two weeks in extended stay hotel in Arizona. 

No family housing is available for this internship. Housing is in a shared setting with common living room, kitchen, and bathroom facilities. 

Because the BLM field stations have sometimes been in remote locations, Professor Wagner purchased a StarLink system, so the interns would have access to internet wherever they lodge. Camping for a few nights each summer is optional. Both previous Bill Lane interns chose to camp a few nights so that they could sample wildlands away from hotels and the BLM bunkhouses. 

Interns may be expected to share a bedroom for some locations but generally will have their own room or bunk space at most locations. There are laundry facilities onsite. Pets are not allowed in shared housing.

Transportation/Car: Yes, it is necessary to have a car since the interns will be residing and sampling at remote locations so having a car for grocery shopping and sampling different locales on a weekly basis is enormously helpful. 

Only one of the two summer interns need have a vehicle. Some additional monetary support will be put aside for the intern that brings a vehicle.

The intern MUST have a driver's license (for safety reasons in case of an emergency). 

Locations: SW Idaho and SE Arizona with brief forays into adjacent states of Oregon, Utah, and Washington. Final week at the Wagner Lab at the University of Connecticut, Storrs, CT.