Alex in downtown Hartford
Cameron’s research student Alex Perez had the dream job of the semester: ride your bike for credit. Equipped with a small GPS, Alex’ bike rides contributed to an on-line bicycle map for the Hartford region, which you can access here. You can read Alex original post at Trinitycology.
This weekend we joined colleagues from SUNY Oneonta to collect sediment cores from Otsego Lake in upstate New York. Together with Dr. Les Hasbargen and his students we spent a day on the ice and collected over 20 meters of cores from two sites. The samples will be analyzed by Trinity students who will attempt to reconstruct the environmental history of the region. The video shows a brief summary of our expedition.
Enjoy!
(by C.Douglass and J. Morrison)
Building on the ENVS program’s long-term research along the Park River in Hartford, this year’s Methods in Environmental Science students have once again developed, designed, and carried out their own studies – which they presented this week. Research focused on a section of the south branch of the Park River where the CT DEEP will begin a massive re-channelization project in spring 2014 that will remove vegetation and sediment from the channel. Students’ research covered topics ranging from determining concentrations of mercury and trace metals in stream sediments to evaluating temporal changes in pH and stream discharge. On land, students compared soil organic carbon levels and invertebrate species diversity between stands of the invasive plant Japanese knotweed and within plant communities dominated by goldenrods and other native forbs.
Last Thursday about a hundred undergraduate science students presented the results of their summer research. ENVS was, as always well-represented: Maddie had written up most of the research on her (still preliminary) pollen diagram from Lake Louise in Penwood State Park, while Jamie found some evidence for several periods of increased storminess in sediment-magnetic data from Otsego Lake in Upstate New York.Justin and Dan tried to impress innocent first-year students from Joan’s seminar with their flashy poster on soil sampling in the White Mountains.
Rose and Sarah, on the other hand never quite realized that all those “submit your poster now” e-mails were really directed at them. Not to worry – we’ll make them earn their keep by nominating them for some onerous task in the spring.
Maddie and Christoph Geiss went up North for a visit to Harvard Forest in Petersham, MA. Maddie got some one-on-one instructions on how to identify tricky and not-so-tricky pollen from Wyatt Oswald.
With only two scopes available, Christoph drew the short straw, had to leave them to their slides, and go for a walk, exploring the forest.
What a miserable way to spend a morning! But, hey, if its for the good of our students we all suffer. Harvard Forest is great. Two short hiking paths teach you about land use history and forest evolution. The paths are lined by numerous experiments. The entire forest seems to be wired and labelled.
Which is probably just a sneaky way to show all our tax (NSF) dollars at work. The rest of the forest, away from the trails, is probably completely full of trees. :-) . Christoph Geiss, investigative reporter, will convince Maddie that she’ll definitely need some more help, return to Harvard Forest, sneak off the trail and work on some more conspiracy theories.
Hey, it was fun! I highly recommend a visit. If you go and read the signs or the trail guides you’ll even be able to tell whether this stone wall once surrounded a field or a pasture. How? Hey, I can’t give away all my secrets. Go – see for yourself!
(courtesy of Cameron Douglass)
Which picture (left or right) shows an invasive species? One lucky contestant with the right answer wins an all expenses paid “vacation” to the Phragmites Lodge and Resort in beautiful Lord Cove.
Submit your answer.
The official summer research program ended last week with a big barbecue (Profs Bill Church and Christoph Geiss, head-barbecuists) and summer research presentations. ENVS was very well represented by Dan and Justin, who looked a bit nervous before their talk,
but did a very fine job telling us about their ongoing research in the White Mountains of New Hampshire.
Now that their standard solutions have finally arrived Justin is eager to get started on his handful of samples.
Rose and Sarah have been working as interior designers, furnishing Cameron Douglass’ lab, and have been kept busy making artificial weeds.
For all of you who don’t have enough naturally occurring weeds in your back yard: all you need is a few sticks, tin snips, blotting paper, and two students who carefully cut out each leaf by hand. My request for naturalistic serrated edges was nixed. Cameron’s weeds have a total of six square blotting paper leaves.
No fake weeds in Christoph Geiss’ lab. Counting pollen is exhausting, as one can see:
and Jami only has twenty five thousand measurements to go. Almost done, I’d say.
At the same time, guest-researcher Kelsey is busy re-learning ArcGIS in the lab. A dozen more maps and she’ll be done as well. Kelsey, just a heads-up: we’ll need the lab in September to teach Geology again, so quit slacking!
Kelsey Semrod (’12) of “I want to change my adviser!” fame came for a visit this week to work on her manuscript with Jon Gourley. Kelsey’s senior thesis dealt with heavy metal concentrations in Park River sediments, and Kelsey and Jon had been working to publish the study since last May. After graduation Kelsey spent a few months swatting mosquitoes in northern Minnesota (working for Outward Bound) before getting a job with MicroStrategy as a product manager.
Officially Kelsey came to do research – unofficially she came because she missed McCookout, and her advisers. She even wanted her picture taken with Jon Gourley and Christoph Geiss.
After seeing the picture Christoph was seriously considering asking Jon for his stylish hat. But then – with hair like this you might as well show it off! Thanks for visiting, Kelsey!
Cameron, Sarah and Rose spent several days in the field this week exploring sites for new research projects. At Goodwin College’s Keeney Cove property along the Connecticut River they battled forests of poison ivy and swarms of mosquitoes (Cameron’s magical shirt kept him bite free – Rose ended up with over 50 nibbles), where they looked at locations for long term floodplain monitoring with Goodwin’s Bruce Morton and Nels Barrett of the NRCS. They also visited Scott Smedley’s compost pile/stone wall research plots in Andover and surveyed invasive plant-filled forest sites for their potential to be restored as habitat for the nearly endangered New England cottontail rabbit.
Jon Gourley and his two students, Justin and Dan, are spending the week in the White Mountain sampling soils in soon to be clear-cut forest areas. Asides from being very fashionable in their fancy ENVS T-shirts, they claim to have sampled over 200 soil samples for nutrient analyses. Once analyzed, these samples will form a baseline for soil nutrient content and how soil nutrients are affected by clear cutting.
