Author: harvardforest

Former Interns Earn Distinguished Research Awards

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Four recent Harvard Forest interns have earned prestigious research awards for their continued work in biology and ecology – 3 Graduate Research Fellow Program (GRFP) awards from the National Science Foundation, and 1 Fulbright.

Here, they share more about their current research and the paths that led them there, and offer some advice to future students.

Eleanna Cerda, who completed a Harvard Forest Summer Research internship in 2019, has earned a GRFP to support her doctoral work at Penn State, in the Renner lab and with researchers at the Center for Parasitic and Carnivorous Plants. Her work will sequence the genomes of various species of carnivorous plants, investigate gene expression as it relates to plant carnivory, and also explore plasticity in carnivorous pitcher plants.

Eleanna says research at Harvard Forest was a pivotal experience that, combined with plant biology classes at Mount Holyoke College, cemented her motivation to pursue a PhD in the field. Conducting scientific research, attending workshops and making connections at Harvard Forest, she says, ultimately helped her to achieve her goals: “I was grateful to have the chance to sit amongst a group of powerful scientists, and ask questions not as just a student but as a scientist too. This experience not only solidified my passion for plant biology, but also allowed me to imagine myself as a researcher. As a first-generation, low-income student, it was difficult to imagine myself as a scientist, because I did not know what it meant to be one outside of the science fiction movies and books.”

Eleanna says she is grateful for amazing mentors—including Sydne Record, Aaron Ellison, and Paige Kouba at Harvard Forest—who supported her in the graduate school process, nurtured her interest in carnivorous plants, and helped her imagine a future in which she could research them.

Reflecting on her academic journey, she notes, “I am glad that I took advantage of the liberal arts curriculum in college and expanded beyond my comfort zone. Even though I grappled with imposter syndrome in STEM, I was continually inspired by the plants and people I met along the way. One of the most important steps in my journey was learning to reach out for help. Because a career in science was so elusive, I knew that I had to reach out to the people who had already been on that path and/or could equip me with the tools and knowledge to take that journey. I was fortunate enough to find incredible mentors who introduced me to not only new topics, but also to opportunities such as Harvard Forest. The experiences I exposed myself to, and the mentorship I sought, led me to question my career path, and to eventually begin this journey.”

“Knowing how impactful mentorship has been in my career so far, I hope to use the knowledge and advice I gathered over the years and pay it forward. I have recently applied to mentor college students from marginalized backgrounds such as first-generation and low-income students. I also hope to diversify the field of STEM in other ways as well.”

Elise Miller, a Harvard Forest Summer Research intern in 2019, has been awarded a GRFP to support her doctoral work in Jessica Savage’s lab at the University of Minnesota—Duluth. Her thesis project will investigate the tissue in plants that transports the sugars produced in photosynthesis – specifically, how changes in plant growth correspond with changes in this tissue.

Elise says her work at Harvard Forest is actually what first introduced her to the specific plant tissue she is now researching. During her summer internship, she studied the tissue in plants that transports water, and often helped her research mentor Tim Rademacher on a project that involved chilling the plant tissue she is now studying. She says Harvard Forest was transformative for her, and got her interested in her current project.

She offers advice to current and future students: “One of the most important steps for me was reaching out to a faculty member, Dr. Stephen Saupe at Harvard, to conduct independent research. Even though that original project was fairly small, it led me on to bigger projects. Dr. Saupe hired me to work in the greenhouse and also sent me flyers for potential summer research programs, including the HF program. My summer at HF was also a transformative step that convinced me I wanted to keep conducting research. Overall, I think one of the most important things that future students can do is to make connections with people whose research or work you like, because this will help you find your path in life. And, even if you don’t think you are qualified for a position, apply for it! I did not think I would get into the HF program, but I still applied because I was interested.”

Jolene Saldivar was an intern in the Harvard Forest Summer Research Program in 2017 and soon after, she graduated from Humboldt State University.

Her NSF Graduate Research Fellowship will support her doctoral work at the University of California—Riverside in the Wilson Rankin lab. Her research will investigate the effects of disturbance on migratory painted lady (Vanessa cardui) butterflies and the native annual forbs they use as host plants and nectar sources in southern California.

The work Jolene did at Harvard Forest involved using community science and long-term ecological research to examine phenological trends in the Northeastern U.S.  She reports that both community science and long-term databases play a major role in her current research. “Since I am studying a migratory pollinator,” she explains, “having access to historical and real-time data is vital. The resources and skills I gained from my time at Harvard Forest have been instrumental in my success thus far.”

Her advice to future students? “As students, we often experience rejection,” she notes. “Frequent rejections may result in students leaving STEM-based majors. This is particularly true for first-generation students who are often navigating academia on their own. I think it is important to take missed opportunities and turn them into learning lessons. Each time I was denied a funding opportunity or admission to a PhD program, I looked for opportunities that would make my application stronger the next time around. My journey ultimately brought me back to my hometown to attend UC Riverside as a PhD student. I am grateful every day to be near my family and for the opportunity to give back to my community. Everything has truly come full circle for me.”

“As a member of several groups that have been historically underrepresented in STEM, I experienced a lot of hardships when I entered academia. I was also transitioning from serving six years in the US Air Force, so those hardships were two-fold. Thanks to the work of many dedicated people across different disciplines, academia is diversifying, and I am very hopeful for the future.”

Learn more about Jolene and her research at www.jolenesaldivar.weebly.com.

Amy Li was a Winter Intern at Harvard Forest in January 2019, and went on to produce a documentary about Harvard Forest research during her senior year at Harvard. She has earned a Fulbright research grant to work with Geir Johnsen at the Norwegian University of Science and Technology in Trondheim, Norway. She will be using hyperspectral imagery, a method of imaging that collects highly detailed information across the electromagnetic spectrum, to study cold-water coral and other marine organisms. A significant component of her project is to also communicate this work to the public.

Amy’s winter internship at the Forest emphasized science communication, and she produced short videos and contributed to the creation of an ArcGIS StoryMap for conservation audiences. She says this opened her eyes to the power of communicating science and provided her with the opportunity to practice those skills in a really supportive, growth-minded environment. During her Fulbright project, she will use and further develop those skills by sharing the research she is doing with a broader audience, both in Norway and in America.

Her advice to future students? “One of the best pieces of advice I received as an indecisive freshman was to just focus on the next step,” she says. “This broke the daunting ‘five-year plan’ into just a year or even less time and helped clarify what I wanted to try doing next. So I started asking myself questions like, what are you excited to be doing next? Or, what skills or experiences do you want to gain in the next year? This has led me to try out a lot of different types of research, both in topic and approach, which has hopefully brought me closer to where I want to be in the future!” 

(Photo credits, clockwise from top left: photo courtesy of Eleanna Cerda; photo by Shane Miller; photo by Roque Saldivar; photo courtesy of Amy Li)

2021-2022 Bullard Fellows Announced

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We are pleased to announce the Harvard Forest Charles Bullard Fellows for 2021-2022. The mission of the Bullard Fellowship Program is to support advanced research and study by individuals who show promise of making an important contribution–either as scholars or administrators–to forestry and forest-related subjects, from biology to earth sciences, economics, politics, law, and the arts and humanities.

FELLOW INSTITUTION RESEARCH AREA
Patrick Baker University of Melbourne (Australia) Book exploring how a forest stand dynamics framework can help anticipate the impacts of global change on forests
Rakefet David-Schwartz Institute of Plant Sciences, Volcani Center, Rishon Lezion (Israel) Phloem transport in response to drought in forest trees
Christian Marks University of Massachusetts–Amherst Investigating the tradeoffs between the hydraulic and mechanical functions in trees that govern wood density
Brian Sturtevant USDA Forest Service Landscape ecology of fire and insect disturbance, forest dynamics, development
Pamela Templer Boston University Controls on carbon sequestration in mixed temperate and northern hardwood forests

Browse highlights of recent Bullard Fellows:

4 Students Earn Graduate Research Awards; New Award Apps Due May 1

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In fall 2020, four graduate students were selected to receive the first-ever Graduate Research Awards in the Harvard Forest Long-Term Ecological Research Program. The awardees were selected based on the quality of their research proposals, and the potential of their projects to leverage existing HF LTER research and create new LTER collaborations.

Each student presented the results of their work in the March 2021 LTER Symposium.

  • Thomas Muratore, a PhD student in the Frey Lab at the University of New Hampshire, investigated the mediators of soil carbon stocks by comparing the carbon “fingerprints” of incubated soil samples and examining roots and fungal hyphae.
  • Sophie Everbach, a PhD student in the Holbrook Lab at Harvard University, explored the selective decline of eastern hemlocks due to hemlock woolly adelgid, by studying root resource allocation across hemlock age and adelgid infestation severity metrics.
  • Amanda Suzzi, a PhD student at the University of Massachusetts, worked with educators in the Harvard Forest LTER Schoolyard Ecology (K12) Program to develop diversity, equity, and inclusion resources for teacher-developed STEM lesson plans.
  • Nikhil Chari, a PhD student in the Taylor Lab at Harvard University, studied soil cores from an experimentally warmed forest study area to examine the impacts of roots on soil organic matter formation and loss.

Contact LTER graduate student site representative Luca Morreale (lmorreal@bu.edu) or LTER PI Jonathan Thompson for more details or with any questions.

2021 Summer Research Program (virtual)

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(January 15) Applications are open for the 2021 Harvard Forest Summer Research Program, which will be virtual and run from May 24 to August 6.

February 19 Update: the application period is now closed.

Undergraduates from all colleges and universities in the U.S. and territories are eligible to apply; applicants must be U.S. citizens or resident aliens. 

Program participants join a community of fellow students, mentors, and researchers, gaining experience in the full scientific process by working in diverse collaborative teams, developing data science skills, and building professional networks to launch careers that will make a difference in the world.

Projects include work with forest carbon sequestration, soil microbial communities, land-use history and carbon flux forecasting, bee population modeling, and centering Indigenous perspectives in ecology and land-use change.

Applications due February 19, 2021 by 9:00 am EST.

Old-Growth Study Reconstructs Southern NH Forests

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A new study in The Journal of the Torrey Botanical Society employs field data collected by Harvard graduate students nearly 100 years ago, providing a unique opportunity to reconstruct how forests in the region looked before Europeans arrived.

The work characterizes the composition, size distribution, recruitment history, and biomass conditions of old-growth forests in southern New England, centered on the Pisgah forest region of New Hampshire. 

The research team, led by Jamie Waterman and Anthony D’Amato from the University of Vermont, with co-authors David Foster, David Orwig, and Neil Pederson from the Harvard Forest, found that forest composition ranged from areas dominated by large white pine and eastern hemlock to areas dominated by northern hardwoods. The largest trees across the forests studied tended to be pine and hemlock, with shade-tolerant American beech and hemlock making up the majority of the understory. Large pines had a disproportionately high influence on biomass conditions across forests in which they occurred.

The Harvard Forest Archives was central to the work, allowing Waterman to digitize the century-old data necessary for this study from the 1929 master’s thesis by Branch, Daly and Lotti.

The research team notes that the variability of forests in terms of tree age, size, and composition likely reflects the historic importance of disturbance processes like hurricanes, as well as drought and frost events that are known to have impacted the region in the 17th and 18th centuries.

The work provides important insights for forest management efforts that seek to emulate the natural conditions of old-growth forests.

(Photo of old-growth forest at Pisgah courtesy of the Harvard Forest Archive)

Ecological Society of America Features Summer Program Alum Tiffany Carey

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A new video by the SEEDS Program of the Ecological Society of America highlights the environmental career trajectory of Tiffany Carey, who participated in the Harvard Forest Summer Research Program in 2012 and is now Habitat and Education Coordinator at the National Wildlife Federation Great Lakes Regional Center in Detroit. “I always try to find careers – whether I’m at the National Wildlife Federation, whether I’m working in a wildlife ecology lab, whether I’m working in city government – at the nexus of helping people find access to nature, the outdoors, and science,” says Carey.

Watch the video:

 

Documentary Features 30 Years of HF Long-Term Ecological Research

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A new documentary by Amy Li (Harvard College ’20, Harvard Forest wintersession fellow ’19) features 30 years of transformative science in the Harvard Forest Long-Term Ecological Research Program, begun in 1988 and sustaining several of the world’s longest-running forest climate change experiments.

Interviews by the program’s founding and contemporary scientists, plus educators, research fellows, and students – interspersed by stunning footage of the Harvard Forest landscape – follow the story of the LTER program’s origins, goals, and future trajectories.

Watch the documentary:

(Photo by Amy Li)

December 15 Webinar to Highlight Benefits of Forest Conservation

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“Saying Yes to Wildlands AND Woodlands” will feature leaders representing wilderness conservation and responsible forestry, discussing how both strategies can work together to address the climate crisis.

The subject of forest conservation will be center stage in a webinar on December 15 from 4-5:30 featuring Bob Perschel, Executive Director of the New England Forestry Foundation (NEFF), and Jon Leibowitz, Executive Director of the Northeast Wilderness Trust (NWT) as they share the value and imperative of working together to conserve critical forests in New England and beyond. Jon and Bob will be joined by Kristin DeBoer, Executive Director of Kestrel Land Trust, who will introduce the discussion and speakers, moderate the Q&A, and join the discussion.

While NEFF and NWT address forest conservation in different ways, they both will advance the case that wildland and woodlands landscapes are critically important solutions to preserving a healthy planet for all of its inhabitants.

“We’re very excited to have these conservation leaders join us to discuss how New England can best protect and steward its forests in a balanced fashion as the region sits at the precipice of climate change, biodiversity loss, development, and forest fragmentation,” says David Foster, Senior Conservationist at Harvard Forest and Board President of the Highstead Foundation, a sponsor of the organization together with the Wildlands & Woodlands, Farmlands & Communities Initiative.

Perschel and Leibowitz will discuss their perspectives on their organizations’ efforts and step into each other’s shoes (or hats) to better understand the other’s point of view and the value of an integrated approach to conservation. The result: a more complete picture of forest conservation in the northeast and its one-of-a-kind role in serving the planet and its inhabitants.

 

Who:         

Jon Leibowitz, Executive Director, Northeast Wilderness Trust

Bob Perschel, Executive Director, New England Forestry Foundation

Kristin DeBoer, Executive Director, Kestrel Land Trust

Hosted by: 

Highstead Foundation, the Wildlands & Woodlands, Farmlands & Communities Initiative, and Harvard Forest

What:       

Webinar: Saying Yes to Wildlands AND Woodlands

When:       

December 15, 2020 4-5:30 pm, EST

Where:       

Via Zoom Webinar – Registration Required by December 13.

Cost:         

Free

 

(Photo of Lion’s Head in Salisbury, CT – the ancestral homeland of the Mohican people – by John Burk) 

Study: China’s Most Important Trees Are Hiding in Plain Sight

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In ecosystems around the globe, the danger of being a common or widespread species is the tendency to be overlooked by conservation efforts that prioritize rarity. In forests, the most common species can be essential to ecosystem structure and function, which crumble with the decline of these pivotal trees, known collectively as foundation species.

In an effort to identify forest foundation species and elevate their conservation status before they disappear, a unique research collaboration between Chinese and American scientists – sparked by a workshop in Beijing presented by Harvard Forest Senior Ecologist Aaron Ellison – has synthesized long-term biodiversity data from 12 immense forest study plots spanning 1,500 miles, from China’s far north to its southern tropics.

Their results, published today in the journal Ecology, point to maple trees – long appreciated for their autumn foliage and the syrup that graces our tables – as potential foundation species in both China and North America.

The study comes on the heels of the latest “Red List” published by Botanic Gardens Conservation International, which showed that 36 out of the 158 maples species worldwide – nearly a quarter of all maples – are at high risk of extinction in the near future in the wild. Fourteen of those high-risk species exist only in China.

“Foundation species are the species upon which ecosystems are built and supported, just like the foundation of your house,” explains Ellison, Harvard Forest Senior Research Fellow and a co-author of the study. “But they can be so common that they hide in plain sight, overlooked because they lack the cachet and appeal of rarities.”

The study was led by Xiujuan Qiao, an Associate Professor at the Wuhan Botanical Garden of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, who spent all of 2019 in residence at the Harvard Forest facilitating this global collaboration. She adds, “We should pay more attention to foundation species, identifying and protecting them before their inevitable decline.”

(Photo of a long-term forest study plot in China, by Xiujuan Qiao.)

New Grant: Redefining the Ecological Memory of Forest Disturbance

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A new, 4-year grant from the National Science Foundation to HF Senior Ecologists Neil Pederson and Dave Orwig will support an unprecedented inquiry into 600 years of tree growth data from 35 old-growth forest study sites in the Northeast. The research will test the sensitivity of Northeast forest ecosystems to extreme climate events such as drought or late-spring frosts.

Preliminary evidence suggests that tree-killing climatic events like these have historically shaped our region’s forests across wide geographic scales, leaving legacies that last centuries. But these wide-reaching disturbances are rarely represented in the climate models scientists use to make predictions about future forest change. By scaling from seasons to centuries, the scientists say, this project bridges short- and long-term studies to provide information at the scales necessary to guide land-use decisions in complex systems under a changing climate.

In addition to scientific products like amassing a database containing around 1.5 million growth rings, at least 500 years of disturbance history, and wall-to-wall dynamic maps of ecological memory, this project will support half a dozen undergraduate student internships, a post-doctoral fellowship, and a multi-summer research experience for a public school teacher to create lesson plans that will be freely distributed in future workshops for teachers.

Photographs

(click image for high-res)

A man twisting an increment borer into an oak tree

Dr. David Orwig coring a northern red oak in southwestern New Hampshire that dates to the 1780s. This population of oak gave more evidence supporting earlier observations that some tree-killing event stimulated tree recruitment around the Northeast in the late 1700s (Pederson et al. 2017). Photo by Neil Pederson.

Researchers in the woods examine trees

The Harvard Forest Tree Ring Lab Team establishes plots in an old-growth forest in northern New Jersey in November, 2018. While the oldest trees in this forest date to the late 1500s, the northern red oak and trees of other species make a small cohort of recruitment in the late 1700s (Pederson et al., 2017). Photo by Neil Pederson.

A researcher uses an increment borer to core a hickory tree

Sophie Pitney, 2019 Summer Research Program student, cores a shagbark hickory at the Harvard Forest, near the species’ northern range margin. Photo by Neil Pederson. 

Image at top of screen: The Harvard Forest Tree Ring Lab Team cores a tree to update the ages of northern red oak trees in an old-growth forest in upstate New York. From L to R, Dr. Zhen-ju Chen of Shenyang Agricultural University, Dr. David Orwig, and Mel Paduani, 2017 HF Summer Research Program student. The northern red oak population here is multi-aged, but contains a cohort of trees that also date to the late 1700s (Orwig et al. 2001). Photo by Neil Pederson.

2020-2021 Bullard Fellows Announced

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We are pleased to announce the Harvard Forest Charles Bullard Fellows for 2020-2021. The mission of the Bullard Fellowship Program is to support advanced research and study by individuals who show promise of making an important contribution–either as scholars or administrators–to forestry and forest-related subjects, from biology to earth sciences, economics, politics, law, and the arts and humanities.

FELLOW INSTITUTION RESEARCH AREA
Patrick Baker University of Melbourne Book exploring how a forest stand dynamics framework can help anticipate the impacts of global change on forests
Nancy Johnson Northern Arizona University Influence of long-term fertilizer trials on the microbiomes associated with plant roots and mycorrhizal fungi
Thomas Rawinski USDA Forest Service White-tailed deer overabundance and its impacts across the U.S.
Robert Saul Shearwell, LLC Shifts in the definition of “fiduciary responsibility” during an era of climate emergency

Browse highlights of recent Bullard Fellows: