After holding Covid at bay for 2.5 years, it finally caught up with me this fall after I had to travel. My daughter got it as well. Luckily, neither of us felt ill, so I gained a 7-year-old field assistant for a day of water sampling. I spent many days alone in the field this year, so it was nice to have company. It was also a relief to simultaneously get my daughter outside all day and get some work done. Luckily, we have child size waders, so she was ready to get in the streams. A great part of being a graduate student is constantly learning new things and approaching your research questions in different ways. Sometimes, though, that results in taking on projects that are well outside of your knowledge base. That is how I ended up taking water samples with Covid and a second grader for a project that is primarily hydrology focused. I am still working in restored wetlands on former cranberry farms (bogs) but with the goal of understanding how much nitrogen is in rivers when they enter the restored wetlands and how much nitrogen is in the rivers when they leave the restored wetlands, also known as a mass-balance or nutrient budget. Natural resources managers are interested in this question, because the estuaries in southeast Massachusetts, where most cranberry bogs are located, are being polluted with excess nitrogen, which causes many adverse outcomes, such as the death of marine organisms. We are interested in whether restoring former cranberry farms into wetlands can help ameliorate the amount of nitrogen that is reaching the estuaries. Figuring out how much nitrogen the restored wetlands are preventing from flowing downstream on an annual basis requires several pieces of information. We need to know how much water is flowing into and out of the sections of restored stream (called “reaches”) all year long. We also need to know how much groundwater is coming into the stream and how much nitrogen is in the groundwater and stream water. Finally, we must figure out how much of the water in the stream is coming from groundwater and how much comes from precipitation. Understanding stream flow requires periodic measurements of the stream coupled with data from continuously recording instruments that we have in the stream, but the other information requires taking water samples throughout the year. I bring the water samples back to the lab to measure nitrogen concentrations and some other components that help us answer our questions. This project is very much a work in progress, and a bunch of things have not gone as planned. It was harder than expected to find the groundwater to sample. A drought meant that there was almost no precipitation for months, and the stream flows were very low. I’m learning a lot about water, how it moves around, and how to measure it, though. While there is still a lot of data to collect, I think the final product will be useful to managers and will help refine restoration goals and practices.
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Over the summer, I helped lead a field trip to a restored wetland for a Mashpee Wampanoag summer camp. The challenges began immediately. It was a really hot day, and the message to wear long pants and close toed shoes was not effectively passed on to the camp organizers. Welcoming a bus full of people in shorts and sandals to a site with sun and poison ivy and thorns and ticks was not ideal. Despite the challenges, the day began well enough…at least for the adults. We spent the morning as a big group, talking about wetland restoration and learning about indigenous uses for plants and Wampanoag traditions from the head counselors. The afternoon was meant to include small groups rotating between several stations before the campers would head to a local swimming hole. Engaging middle schoolers in plant-related activities right after lunch on a 90+ degree day when they don’t have appropriate clothing and are looking forward to swimming might be possible, but it was definitely not possible with the planning I had done. My attempts at getting the campers excited about the hands-on activity were mostly met with blank stares, and I don’t really blame them. It was hard to precede swimming on such a hot summer day, and I was not at my most creative in the hot weather. I certainly could have spent more time adapting the planned activity to a summer camp setting and not relied as much on the activity someone else had used in the past, but there was nothing I could do about weather or timing.
Failures – many of them – are a frequent part of graduate school. Failures can feel outsized when all the focus (in academia) is on the funding you do get, the manuscripts you do publish, and the positions you do get. I think enduring failure gets easier as you face more of them. There may be no substitute for actual experience but knowing that even the most “successful” people have a long list of failures can be useful. In 2010, Melanie Stefan wrote an article in Nature about creating a CV of failures, and Johannes Haushofer (Professor of Economics at Stockholm University) published the most widely seen CV of failures in 2016 when he was an Assistant Professor at Princeton. I have helped 100s of undergraduates write resumes and have spent a lot of time thinking about how to make experiences sound as impressive as possible. The CV of failures is the opposite – a recounting of academic and professional failures. The idea of sharing failures, despite the number or magnitude of your successes, is powerful. Knowing about the failures of others may never make our own sting less, but they may provide some motivation to move forward after each failure. Of course, failures are not distributed equitably, and some people and groups endure more adverse and uncontrollable circumstances than others. I think it is important learn from failures, and I hope I can recognize the components of individual failures that are out of my control while also recognizing and working to change the systemic elements of my field that make failures fall disproportionately. “How do you know how to do this?” asked my daughter’s first-grade teacher in the middle of an activity I was doing with the class. I suppose her expectations of my abilities to engage 6 and 7 year-olds about plants were low, but I was just relieved to hear that she wasn’t mortified that I had brought bags of poison ivy into her classroom. As I was preparing, I asked myself many times whether bringing poison ivy on a school visit was a good idea, but I duct taped the Ziploc bags of poison ivy shut and went for it. Though our activity was going to focus on observation and prediction, I’m often surprised at the number of people who cannot identify poison ivy, so I thought it couldn’t hurt to show the students what it looks like. Perhaps unsurprisingly, it turns out that first graders know A LOT of things, including many other people named Sarah, who I heard about in detail (not a big surprise considering the number of Sarahs out there, especially in the demographic of people who have first graders). They also have many thoughts on poison ivy, which was wonderful.
We talked about the difference between an observation and a prediction (Observation: Ms. F’s shirt is green. Prediction: Ms. F’s favorite color is green), and they worked in small groups to make their own observations. It was tough for them to really stick to observations and not “I think” statements. By prediction time, they all suspected that it was poison ivy, so we made predictions about the color, how I got the plants into the bags without getting a rash, and why poison ivy is poisonous. The students had a lot of ideas to share, some related to the observations and predictions and some about their personal experiences with poison ivy. One of the quieter students very quickly predicted that the plant makes toxic oils to defend against plants, which was amazing. When covid shut down pools, a lot of swimmers took to lakes, rivers, and the ocean. For sure, there was a robust open water swimming community pre-covid, including folks who complete all sorts of very long and very cold swims. For the rest of us, we had to figure out our tolerance for cold water (and our tolerance for spending money on more gear to better endure those cold temperatures). During the 1.5 years that the pool where I typically swim was unavailable to me, I had the pleasure of swimming in many ponds, most commonly Walden Pond in Concord, MA. I was quickly sold on swimming outside at dawn, spotting bald eagles and great blue heron, hearing loons, and enjoying fall foliage. I’m told there are a lot of fish to see as well, but I have a funny habit of closing my eyes underwater. After two open water swimming seasons, I have determined that water colder than 55 F is pretty much too cold for me. I swam twice in 53 F water, and neither time went very well despite a gear upgrade for the second try. (My gear-buying tolerance did not match that of my friends with real, non-PhD student jobs, but the pull of swimming is strong.) As the open water swimming season approaches once again, the calibration of our bodies to water temperature has me thinking about phenology. The University of Wisconsin Extension defines phenology as, “a branch of science that studies the relationships between periodic biological events—usually the life cycles of plants and animals—and environmental changes.” The date when Walden Pond is warm enough for me to swim is not particularly important, but the date when specific plant species leaf out or flower has ecosystem consequences. Animal migration and pollinator emergence are also important events, and changes in phenology does not affect all species in the same way. Changes in phenology are one response to climate change. Walden Pond was three degrees cooler on the second Sunday in May in 2022 than it was in 2021, but the National Phenology Network reports the spring leaf out to be days to weeks earlier in the Northeast this year than the past 30-year average. They also reported in 2018 that across the U.S. spring was generally starting earlier than 20th century averages. Changes in phenology can disrupt ecosystem processes, such as pollination, animal migration, and when light reaches a forest understory. Phenology is also important for more human-centered events such as when to plant, fertilize, and harvest; optimal timing for managing invasive species; and allergy and mosquito season. Long-term phenological datasets, such as those kept by Aldo Leopold and Henry David Thoreau, provide the data needed to examine links between changes in phenology and climate change. Starting with Thoreau, years of records in Concord, MA, have allowed researchers to document many climate change-induced changes, including the loss of about a quarter of the town’s wildflower species. I appreciate the opportunity to swim in a beautiful place that has contributed to our understanding of natural history and climate change. Luckily, this spring, I can swim in an indoor pool as I wait for Walden Pond to warm to a tolerable temperature. (All Walden Pond images by Ian Waitz.)
These short, cold winter days have me thinking about the spring and summer days I spent in the greenhouse – sometimes a lovely, warm respite and sometimes a sweltering task. In the greenhouse, I was conducting a seed bank study. A seed bank is a place where seeds are stored, like how banks store money (theoretically). In my case, I was studying seeds that were stored in the soil. I work in restored wetlands on former cranberry farms (also called bogs). The restoration activities remove most of the plants that are on the bogs, but after restoration, a lot of plants grow that were not planted. We are interested in where those plants come from and whether they are growing from seeds stored in the seed bank. In fall 2019, I (with help from several wonderful folks) collected A LOT of soil. I collected samples from the top layer of soil at several former cranberry farms, and I also collected samples from deep under the surface that dated from before the wetlands were turned into farms. When covid delayed my plans, all that soil took up a lot of refrigerator space for a year and a half. It was exciting to finally get the soil into pots and in the greenhouse in April. We kept the soil in some of the pots wet, some dry, and some underwater. Plants grew! Differentiating between different graminoids (grass-like plants) when they’re small is hard! Counting and identifying graminoids underwater is especially hard! All in all, 30 species grew from the seed bank seeds. In the field we see >100 species at some sites, but some species do not predominantly grow from seed or have seeds that do not persist in the seed bank. The most germination was in the wet pots and the least was in the dry pots. Soil from the surface of the bogs had many more viable seeds than pre-farming soil from deep below the surface. We still have more conclusions to draw from this seed bank study, but it is interesting to see the number and diversity of viable seeds in the top 30 cm of soil that was applied by the cranberry farmers. Spreadsheets are what now remains of this study. As I’m working through all the data this winter, I’ll be thinking about counting plants while listening to music in a nice, warm greenhouse. The field season in our wetland ecology lab is punctuated by a lot of trips to Mansfield supply (the local hardware store) and Home Depot. One rainy afternoon last summer, after I had gotten drenched surveying plants at the restored wetlands where I work, I hopped from hardware store to hardware store on Cape Cod trying to find a piece of foam. I finally found a package of foam insulation small enough to fit into my car. Then I headed back to my father-in-law’s workshop to transform the foam into a floating platform for a static chamber. Static chamber is a fancy name for a section of capped PVC piping. PVC, with scientific names, figures prominently in my field work. We use static chambers to measure the accumulation of greenhouse gasses (carbon dioxide – CO2, nitrous oxide – N2O, and methane – CH4) over time. The chamber has two parts. The bottom is just a plain section of PVC with two small holes drilled in the sides. This summer, I used 4” diameter pipe that was cut into 15 cm (~6 in) pieces, but chambers come in many different sizes. The bottom of the chamber gets partially buried in the ground. When there is standing water that is too deep, we cannot use the chamber base, and that is where the floating foam comes in. When we are ready to sample, we place the chamber top on the base or into a hole in the foam and create an airtight seal. The top of the chamber is a PVC cap into which we drill holes and install two ports. One of the ports allows us to use a syringe and needle to extract gas from inside the chamber and put it into a sealed vial. The contents of the vial can then be tested by a machine in the lab that tells us the concentration of greenhouse gasses. My research is on former cranberry farms (also called cranberry bogs) that have been restored back into wetlands. Most cranberry farms in Massachusetts were originally built on wetlands, many with rivers flowing through the bog. One component of my work focuses on whether the restored wetlands can help decrease the amount of nitrogen pollution that reaches coastal estuaries downstream. Too much nitrogen in the estuaries can lead to excess growth of algae and lead to the death of fish and other marine organisms. One of the greenhouse gasses measured from the chambers, nitrous oxide, is a form of nitrogen that can give us information about whether the wetlands are helping remove nitrogen from the system. It can be disappointing to see no accumulation of gas after spending a lot of time making, testing, and sampling the chambers and running the samples in the lab, and I found no accumulation of nitrous oxide in my chambers. Nitrous oxide is a very potent greenhouse gas, almost 300 times more potent than carbon dioxide, so it is, ultimately, good that the restored wetlands are not emitting additional greenhouse gasses into the atmosphere. We are still working on different methods to understand what is happening with the nitrogen in the system. There will definitely be more PVC in my future as I continue to attempt to answer that question.
I come from a family of worriers. My parents still ask me to text them when I arrive somewhere after traveling…and I haven’t lived with them for more than 20 years. So, I don’t typically take a lot of risks. A few years ago, I began thinking that I would have some interesting experiences if I took more risks. Rather than starting with something small, I decided to dive into the risk deep end. The idea of going back to school had been kicking around in my head for a little while and then I saw that a friend of mine, who is a professor at the University of Connecticut, was advertising for a PhD student. I don’t live in Connecticut and didn’t have plans to move there, but the second time I saw the advertisement, I decided to respond. Two years later, I left my job and entered the PhD program in the Department of Natural Resources and the Environment at UConn. By the time I started, I was 10 years removed from getting my master’s degrees (not to mention 10+ years older than most other students in the department), had two young children, and lived 1.5 hours from campus. So far, I do not regret taking this big risk. I love the variety in my work, spending time in the field, lab, office, and classroom as a student and instructor. I intentionally got involved with a project, studying outcomes of wetland restoration on retired cranberry bogs, that would allow me to work with people from government agencies, NGOs, and other research institutions. My advisor has been a great combination of demanding and supportive. Other committee members, both at UConn and elsewhere, have been extremely generous with their time, advice, and data. All of the typical challenges of graduate school remain and are enhanced by living far away and having kids (not to mention the global pandemic), but I have a bit more perspective now than I did when I was 25. I like to think I am a little better at handling rejection and criticism, which is good, because graduate school is full of rejection and criticism. There is a lot of work, I have less time to sleep because I have more responsibilities outside of school, and I do feel badly that I cannot spend much time with the other graduate students, which is usually a highlight of graduate school. On the other hand, switching into kid mode after work every day provides important balance, and, occasionally, my kids moonlight as field assistants. This whole endeavor is made possible by support from my family and friends. Everyone was amazingly encouraging, and, as one friend said, life is both too short and too long to not make a change that you want to make. I know many people do not have this opportunity, and I feel extremely fortunate. I do think, though, that there are many ways to take risks, small and large, or ways we can push ourselves to grow and learn. I hope that I can continue to proactively seek out those opportunities. |
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