Dan Dillon, Ben Glass-Siegel, Nate Vandiver, and I stood at the edge of a Baltimore road. Cars whizzed by overhead as Glass-Siegel and Vandiver picked their way through dense grass to the river running swiftly beneath the bridge, the blades swishing against their long pants as they blazed a path to the rocky shoreline. Glass-Siegel…
LTER Roadtrip – Using Tree Rings to Solve Mysteries
I like to think of Dr. Neil Pederson as a detective. We met in his office at the Harvard Forest Long Term Ecological Research site (HFR-LTER), on the second floor of one of their many beautiful buildings in what feels like a college campus. Multiple sections of tree trunks sit here and there, polished so…
LTER Road Trip – Invasive Species Removal
Students gathered at a saltmarsh site in Massachusetts, taking a break from their regular school day routine to remove invasive perennial pepperweed plants from among the bushes and marsh grasses. Originally from West Asia and Europe, the leafy pepperweed can grow 2-5 feet tall, blooming with small, white, four-petaled flowers. Unfortunately, left alone the pepperweed…
