Carbon Modeling

Goals: Determine if thinning treatments affect surface soil organic carbon and evaluate the accuracy of common model projections for the forest floor C pool.

Methods: Soil core sampling, loss-on-ignition, elemental analysis, forest vegetation simulator growth and yield model

Takeaways: Small skips and gaps minimize disturbance effects that limit the delivery of organic matter to the forest floor. This reduces soil-borne carbon losses by preserving soil inputs.

Broader Impacts: This research was started as an undergraduate capstone project and I published the work to serve as my thesis for graduate study. I gave three presentations of this work and presented two posters at both local and international science conferences.

Skills: Field ecology, computational ecology, simulation modeling, GIS and cartography, science communication