Phew … it’s the annual winter break breath catching here in the Trinity Weed Lab. We had a very busy fall 2015 semester, which you could probably tell from the lack of recent posts. Not to mention that Lupita and Jordan are both abroad for this entire academic year, and while we all miss their presence in the lab, it seems like they’re have fun:
So, to catch you up on what we’ve been working on:
- “Functional impacts of woody invasive species assemblages on bird communities” project: We made a lot of progress on what is turning out to be a complicated project last semester! Emily and Sarah took (or more accurately, were given) the lead on writing the first half (Introduction/Methods) of the manuscript for this project, and after lots of research and revisions came up with a very strong start to the manuscript. Emily also was able to finalize the conversion of the plant community data we collected last summer into GIS data, which was necessary for comparing the spatial distributions of plant and bird communities at the Knox Preserve (check out her work below). Meanwhile, we had several intrepid volunteers (Diane Hitchcock, Beth Sullivan and Bill Furgueson) who spent most of their weekends last fall at our field site collecting data on migratory bird communities at Knox. We’re now working on entering these last bits of data into GIS, and finalizing data analyses and manuscript preparations. Stay tuned for updates over at the project webpage.
- “Management of woody invasive species assemblages” project: We collected our last round of field data for this project back in September (2015), see the previous post for cool picture of that day! We spent much of the last semester compiling all of the different pieces of data we collected for that project – including: plant community diversity data; data on plant canopy structure and closure; and morphology data for target invasive and native species that will be used for functional diversity analyses – and are now working on finalizing data analyses and preparing a manuscript on this project. Stay tuned for updates over at the project webpage.
Other cool projects:
- Isabelle Moore – Community Learning Research Fellows Program: Fighting the Hartford Food Desert … learn more about this great research project (in collaboration with the local organization Billings Forge Community Works) by downloading Isabelle’s final poster here. The final capstone event for the program was covered o Trinity’s website.
- Alex Perez – Alex continued to build on his efforts to study cycling infrastructure and build an engaged cycling community in Hartford by: 1) Establishing a cool new web “diary” (Two-Wheeled Hartford) of his visual perspective on cycling in Hartford; 2) Interning with Hartford’s Department of Development Services – you can learn more about his internship by reading his great editorial for the Hartford Courant: “Hartford Needs to Make Room for Bikes” … Alas, Alex is studying abroad also next semester, but you can follow his journey through the world’s great cities at Trinity’s Center for Urban and Global Studies webpage.