For most of the summer, I continued my research on sustainability and community development. However, towards the end of the summer, I decided to change my major to Biology (or possibly Environmental Science). Because of this, I ended up reworking my entire research topic and plan. 

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Even though I still found social science research very interesting, I wanted to focus more on scientific/biological research and design & conduct some sort of experiment. I was interested in ecology and after exploring different potential research topics, I came across the wildfires in California and Oregon. There was a lot of research being done on how the wildfires displaced communities and affected the lives of people who experienced them, but I wanted to focus on how the wildfires impacted the natural environment and different species. 

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I considered a couple different topics related to this, such as ecological restoration, wildfire prevention, groundwater and rainwater collection methods, etc. However, I ultimately decided that I wanted to focus on the impact the wildfires had on local biodiversity and compare my results to regions that hadn't been impacted by the wildfires as harshly.