Hey Now!
Just before I left to camp on Mt. Hood, Carl asked about what research I was doing up there, which I didn't have time to go into (plus CoC doesn't allow for many characters in its chat).
The two previous summers to this one, I've been working as a research assistant to Dr. Nancy Broshot, who heads up the Environmental Studies department at Linfield College. Over the past 20 years, Dr. Broshot has been performing a long term longitudinal study Forest Park, a 5,000 acre stretch of forest snuggled up against Northwest Portland and which is the largest natural urban forest in the United States.
The focus of Dr. Broshot's research has been the long term effects of Urbanization on the various plant and avian communities found in the park, and without boring you all with too much detail, her research has found sharply increased tree mortality in the past two decades, some of it likely due naturally to successional processes, some of it not. That wouldn't be so bad by itself, but sapling and seedling recruitment at each research site is virtually non-existent. Long story short, the trees are dying, and the baby trees that should be taking their place are not doing so. To try and discern the cause(s), she started another study in 2003, in which she planted Western Red Cedar saplings at 9 randomly selected sites in Forest Park (27 saplings per site), remeasuring them annually. The results of that study have shown widely varied tree mortality in the saplings, ranging from 10-70% mortality depending on the site, the highest mortality levels being found near areas of heavy traffic, which suggests that nitrogen deposition due to air pollution may be the culprit.
To assist Dr. Broshot study what is going on with the lack of tree recruitment in the park, over the spring semester of 2014, I designed a research project, and submitted my proposal to Linfield's JCDE scholar program, a yearly competition at Linfield, which I won. To that end, this summer I have been performing soil sampling at each of the 26 long term research sites, the 9 sapling recruitment study sites, as well as establishing 3 control sites of my own away from Portland, which mirror her long term research sites exactly (minus the air pollution). Once all the soil samples have been collected and processed, I will be analyzing them at Portland State University which has a bunch of cool equipment Linfield can only dream of owning, like a mass spectrometer/elemental analyzer, to determine what levels of nitrogen and carbon are present in the soil at the various study sites in Forest Park, compared to my study sites up near Mt. Hood.
This winter, I will be presenting a poster based on the research at an Urban Ecology conference on the PSU campus, as well as another presentation in the spring on Linfield's campus, and depending on what the results of the elemental analysis show, I may end up writing and submitting a co-authored paper with Dr. Broshot to a scientific journal, based off our findings.
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Sorry for the wall of text - I really tried to keep that as short as possible, but I think you can see why I wanted to wait to talk about it after I got back, rather than in CoC! ^_^
Also, if anyone is interested, here is a link to the abstract for the journal article Dr. Broshot wrote about her findings in Forest Park - I'm sure I have the whole article around somewhere, but I'm having trouble finding it.
http://link.springer.com/article/10.100 ... 007-0023-xIrm