Author: harvardforest

Summer Interns Arrive to Advance Research Projects

Posted on by harvardforest

This week, in addition to the chorus of tree frogs and the bloom of pink lady’s slippers, 21 undergraduate students arrived at Harvard Forest. Hailing from universities across the country, students began their 11-week Summer Research Program internships in which the pursuit of mentored team projects will span topics that include root microbes, seedling regeneration, forecasting carbon, and amplifying indigenous voices at Harvard Forest. 

The program is co-led by Senior Researcher & Site Manager Audrey Barker Plotkin and Higher Education & Lab Coordinator Ben Goulet-Scott. This year’s Program Assistant, Abigayl Novak, has a master’s degree in forest resources and research experience on the recruitment of women in the sciences.

Harvard Forest’s Summer Research Program in Ecology is funded by Harvard University and the National Science Foundation’s Long-Term Ecological Research and Research Experiences for Undergraduates programs. 

 

Grad Student Opportunity: Summer Digital Learning Specialist

Posted on by harvardforest

The Harvard Forest Schoolyard Ecology team is seeking two part-time, remote Harvard graduate student interns to create an interactive web feature that will allow K12 classrooms to interact with our innovative and award-winning Witness Tree Media Project. The two students will work with our team to develop this resource over a combined period of 150 hours (75 hours per student) between the months of June and August 2023.

We are grateful to a grant from the Harvard University Climate Change Solutions Fund for supporting this work.

(Pictured: 2023 winter interns and mentors)

Bullard Spotlight: Exploring Harvard Forest's Ectomycorrhizae with Jenny Bhatnagar

Posted on by harvardforest

The growth of trees in Harvard Forest depends heavily on ectomycorrhizal (EM) fungi, which colonize the roots of live trees, but there is currently no well-curated database on EM fungal abundance and diversity at the forest. To address this, Bullard Fellow Jenny Bhatnagar is compiling data from different fungal herbaria to create the first longitudinal dataset of fungal incidence and abundance at Harvard Forest.

These datasets will supplement long-term datasets on forest recovery in the face of urbanization and climate change. Based at Boston University, the Bhatnagar Lab of Microbial Ecology is finding that historic, pre-colonial forests in the US were more EM-dominated than today, with N deposition contributing to a shift towards arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) dominance. However, forest plots that were historically more EM are more resistant to this shift, which has implications for the terrestrial carbon cycle as EM forests store more carbon in the soil than AM forests.

Jenny’s work at Harvard Forest is particularly special because of the well-characterized land use and climate history, as well as the careful reconstruction of aboveground forest recovery that her research team can match to belowground forest recovery. This project marks the beginning of the Bhatnagar Lab’s research at the Forest, but will serve as a foundation for future studies on forest fungi and their relation to forest biodiversity and biogeochemistry. 

(Photo courtesy of Jenny Bhatnagar)

Survivors: An Event to Celebrate Old Growth Forests (April 26)

Posted on by harvardforest

Join Discover Maynard’s “Week of Trees!” event on April 26, where speakers will discuss human dimensions and perceptions of old growth forests.

Featured speakers include Nipmuc cultural steward André StrongBearHeart, who will discuss landscapes from an understanding of traditional cultural values, Harvard Forest researcher Neil Pederson, who will reflect on what old growth forests represent from a western scientific perspective, photographer Brent Mathison, who will share photos of old growth forests, and Harvard Forest Bullard Fellow Lynda Mapes, who will do the first public reading of her forthcoming book on old growth forests and First Nation People.

This event is open to the public at The Sanctuary, 82 Main St., Maynard, MA. Doors open at 6:00pm with a 6:30pm start.

For more information, visit Discover Maynard’s event page.

An informational flyer for an event

Event photo by Brent Mathison; Close-up photo (above) by Liz Thompson.

Student Event to Mobilize Data Visualization for Local Classrooms

Posted on by harvardforest

What: Design Sprint/Hack-a-Thon to build the scaffolding for a new web-tool that will visualize real-time data from the Witness Tree Social Media Project

Who: Open (free) to Harvard undergraduates and graduate students, particularly those with experience in coding, data visualization, and/or educational technology design for middle and high school audiences. Space is limited to 15 people, so register early!

When: Friday, April 14 from 12:30-3:30pm

Where: Longfellow Hall Room 207; 6 Appian Way Cambridge, MA 02138

The event will begin with lunch and brief presentations by Witness Tree project scientists and educators, followed by group-work sessions for participants to brainstorm design and technical elements that will most effectively engage middle and high school educators and students in exploring Witness Tree data.

The event is co-sponsored by Harvard Forest Schoolyard Ecology and HGSE Students for Climate Justice, and funded by the Harvard University Climate Change Solutions Fund.

Following the design sprint, Harvard Forest will seek to recruit two student interns to work for 3 months remotely (paid), part-time, to develop, fine-tune, and debut the web-tool for teacher feedback in August 2023.

(LIDAR image of the Harvard Forest Witness Tree courtesy of the Schaaf Lab at UMass Boston)

Event poster

Provenance in Art and Science

Posted on by harvardforest

In the world of art, provenance is the history of ownership of a painting or other work of art that helps to establish the work as authentic.  In a similar way, in the world of science, provenance is the history of an item of data that describes how it was created and transformed.  This information (if available) helps the scientist to have confidence that the data are correct and reliable.

Since 2009, the Provenance Project at Harvard Forest has engaged 25 Summer Research Program in Ecology students to develop software tools to track and use provenance for the R programming language.  A recent paper, Making Provenance Work for You, with five REU students as co-authors, describes the results of the project to date and the various ways in which provenance can help to make scientific analyses more transparent and understandable.

 

March 30 & 31: Susan Trumbore Presents Inaugural Bullard Lectures

Posted on by harvardforest

The Harvard Forest and the Harvard University Center for the Environment are delighted to co-present the Inaugural Charles Bullard Lectures featuring Dr. Susan Trumbore, Director and Scientific Member at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry and Professor of Earth System Science at the University of California, Irvine. 

The annual Charles Bullard Lectures were established by the Harvard Forest in 2022 to honor and learn from renowned scholars of forest ecology and conservation. The Lectures are supported by the Charles Bullard endowment and are closely associated with Harvard’s long-running Bullard Fellowship, a distinguished scholar-in-residence program for forest research.

Trumbore’s lectures in Cambridge (in-person, March 30) and in Petersham (in-person and online, March 31) will cover the future of Amazon forests and the transit time of carbon in ecosystems.

What Is the Future of Amazon Forests?

Thursday, March 30; 5:00 PM | BioLabs 1080, 16 Divinity Ave, Cambridge 

Tropical forests process more carbon, water, and energy, and are more diverse than any other land ecosystem. The Amazon Basin contains the largest continuous tropical forest in the world and plays a key role in global climate and atmospheric composition. Amazon forests and soils contain large stores of carbon that are potentially vulnerable to climate change and deforestation and are globally important sources and sinks of carbon. How these systems will respond to climate change and their overall resilience to deforestation are major uncertainties of global importance. This talk will report on how two major collaborative projects in the Brazilian Amazon are filling gaps in our understanding of this key ecosystem and helping to predict the future of Amazon forests. The Amazon Tall Tower Observatory in the central Amazon, brings together more than 200 researchers who study the complex interactions between tropical forests, atmosphere and climate. To the southeast is the drier Amazon ‘arc of deforestation’, where we explore the resilience of forests to human disturbances and climate change. This region has been proposed as one where forests are poised to cross a ‘tipping point’ with the potential to dramatically affect forests and their inhabitants. 

What Controls the Transit Time of Carbon in Ecosystems?

Friday, March 31; 11:00 AM | Zoom & Harvard Forest Fisher Museum, 324 N. Main St, Petersham

Registration not required for in-person event (see the Zoom recording here)

How long does C remain in ecosystems before it is returned to the atmosphere? The answer is important because it tells us how long we might be able to manage vegetation and soils to store carbon. The major measure we have used for this is the ‘turnover time’, estimated as the inventory of carbon divided by the input or output rates. However, a single number is not sufficient to integrate the complex cascade of processes that return C fixed by photosynthesis to the atmosphere. This talk will discuss how the global isotope tracer of bomb radiocarbon can provide a means to estimate the distribution of ages of C being respired from ecosystems. Dr. Trumbore will use data from the new International Soil Radiocarbon Database to demonstrate how transit time distributions change globally, suggest how we can use this information to test global carbon cycle models, and what we can learn about managing soils to take up carbon.

Bullard Spotlight: Lynda Mapes on the Cutting of our First Forests

Posted on by harvardforest

Author and newspaper reporter Lynda Mapes is two-thirds of the way through her 10-month residency at Harvard Forest’s Charles Bullard Fellowship program. 

During her Fellowship, Lynda is researching and writing a book that takes an intimate look at the cutting of our first forests and what that has meant for Native cultures and ecologies. The book travels from First Nations territories in British Columbia and the Pacific Northwest, where logging of old growth is still going on, to the historical bookend of Wabanaki territory, where this all began with the arrival of the newcomers and industrial logging. The book showcases Indigenous-led conservation movements on both coasts and work underway to vision an alternative future, beyond continued extraction of ever-lower value forest products.

Two people standing next to a tree that has an increment borer embedded in it with a tree core protruding

Lynda’s presence has been felt at the Forest for a while now: after her first Bullard Fellowship in 2014-15, her remarkable book, “Witness Tree: Seasons of Change with a Century-Old Oak“, inspired its main character to start their own Twitter account.

Intimate relationships with forest communities are foundational for Harvard Forest’s researchers, and Lynda continues to inspire thoughtful connections through her novel approaches to writing. “I wanted to collaborate with people here looking deeply into the past and future of our forests and communities,” says Lynda. 

Applications Now Open for LTER Student Research Awards

Posted on by harvardforest

Beginning in 2020, research awards for graduate students incorporating Long-Term Ecological Research (LTER) data and objectives have been awarded regularly through Harvard Forest’s LTER Graduate Student Research Awards program. All students wishing to work with the HF LTER program are welcome. No prior association with the LTER program is necessary.

Applications are now open through April 1st, 2023.

To apply, please email the following information to Research Director Jonathan Thompson:

  1. A completed proposal including <1000 word project description and proposed budget of up to $2,500. Priority will be given to research proposals that incorporate: LTER long term data sets, advance objectives described in the LTER VI proposal (science, education, outreach are all OK), and collaborate across one or more career stages (REU, graduate students, post docs, senior scientists). 
  2. A letter (or email) of support from your academic advisor OR an LTER Co-I sponsor. 

Harvard Forest Announces 2023-2024 Charles Bullard Fellows in Forest Research

Posted on by harvardforest

The Charles Bullard fellowship program supports 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 including biology, earth sciences, economics, politics, administration, philosophy, humanities, the arts, or law. Harvard Forest is pleased to announce the upcoming 2023-2024 Charles Bullard Fellows in Forest Research, each of whom will be joining us in the fall of 2023.

Meghan Blusteim is an NSF (National Science Foundation) Postdoctoral Fellow. Her primary research interest is the local adaptation of red oak (Quercus rubra). Her Bullard Fellowship will be spent examining the genes and alleles that enable local adaptation of red oak to global change. She earned her PhD at Harvard University, where she also received the prestigious NSF Graduate Research Fellowship.

Cheryll Holley is the Sonksq (chief) of the Hassanamisco Nipmuc Band. Her research is on Indigenous-centered Forest Management. She plans to spend her Bullard Fellowship creating forest management plans that center the Nipmuc community’s relationships with their more than human kin. She holds a degree in History from Worcester State College, and she is a previous Mellon Visiting Fellow at the Center for the Study of Slavery & Justice, Brown University. 

Zhanshan (Sam) Ma is professor and PI of Computational Biology and Medical Ecology from the Chinese Academy of Sciences, and he holds a double PhD in Computer Science and Entomology. He plans to conduct a cross-scale investigation of forest-soil microbiomes using metacommunity networks, evolutionary games, fault-tolerance theory, and AI approaches. 

Noah McDonald is the Land and Research Coordinator at Southeastern African American Farmers’ Organic Network. His research interests center on native grass and forb restoration and conservation grazing. He will spend his Bullard Fellowship identifying, collecting, and propagating native grasses and forbs. He has a dual BS degree in Biology and Religious Studies from Guilford College. 

Maciej Zwieniecki is a Professor in the Department of Plant Sciences at UC Davis, CA. His primary research is on plant biophysics, tree physiology, ecophysiology, plant water relations, tree non-carbohydrate management. He earned his PhD in tree ecophysiology at Oregon State University. 

While we look forward to working with this great cohort in the fall, we’re also enjoying collaborations with our current Bullard Fellowship recipients. 

Winter Interns Arrive to Advance Harvard Forest Research

Posted on by harvardforest

This winter, seven wonderful students are working with Harvard Forest researchers to advance projects that include amplifying local indigenous voices, creating an environmental history database spanning over 300 years, examining microclimates in declining hemlock stands, and increasing the accessibility of online resources for teachers participating in Harvard Forest’s Schoolyard Ecology program. The team of interns includes Andrea Foo (Harvard Graduate School of Education), Tyler White (Graduate School of Design), and Harvard College students Fechi Inyama, Karina Chung, Charles Hua, Mattheus Carpenter, and Kashish Bastola. We look forward to incorporating their diverse experiences into our research!

New Code of Conduct Outlines Values, Resources, and Expectations

Posted on by harvardforest

A new Harvard Forest Code of Conduct is the culmination of a year-long, iterative process by staff and research fellows to define community expectations and values. The process began with a community-wide workshop by the ADVANCEGeo Partnership. With input from follow-on workshops and surveys, a committee of five staffers and research fellows – Dominick Sullivan, Shersingh Joseph Tumber-Dávila, Meg Fuchs, Audrey Barker Plotkin, and Clarisse Hart – worked to create the final version. The Code sets expectations for all staff, students, faculty, and visitors and will be prominently posted in common spaces, and shared at all events.