Projects

A collaborative study on tree water use dynamics that aims to evaluate the effect of individual trees on urban stormwater mitigation. 

This work brings together managers, academics, and practitioners at the Department of Ecology, Department of Natural Resources, Washington State University, and The Evergreen State College.

We have a state-of-the-art sap flux monitoring system installed in the Evergreen Ecological Observation Network (EEON) forest at the Evergreen State College. Due to this system's large physical footprint, it has limited applications in urban environments. 

We are developing a miniaturized, mobile version of this system that addresses these accessibility concerns and preliminary results suggest data quality is highly superior to this standardized and highly intensive approach.

As time allows, I work with Natural Resource Biologist and educator, Mrs. Katrina Theitje-Weihs, to teach analytical skills to high school students through field ecology workshops. In addition to basic observational and data collection skills, I teach the group to use our miniaturized sap flux monitoring method which demonstrates the simplicity of our approach.

I also work with Tacoma Tree Foundation to host "Water-wise Wandering," a tree walk for community members to engage in open discussion about urban forest management and residential tree care.

The Ellsworth Creek Preserve is a large biological nature preserve managed by The Nature Conservancy (TNC) in Southwest Washington. At Evergreen, students have opportunities to "dig deep" and explore topics that professors are actively researching. Dr. Dylan Fischer and Dr. Michael Case introduced me to this project where researchers are trying to determine if we can accelerate old-growth forest restoration with adaptive management techniques.

The site was formerly private timberland in a variety of mixed stand development stages when TNC acquired the property. It was split up into three sections: north, central, and southern, and 224 research plots were installed and inventoried in 2007. In 2020, repeat measurements were collected from 60 plots and we used both 2007 and 2020 datasets to model the impacts of treatment prescriptions on several carbon pools over time.

Results suggested that soil carbon wasn't significantly impacted by treatments in the short-term, but its possible that treated stands recovered already. A chrono-sequence study was conducted in Alaska in 2003 to represent stand development stages and found that soil carbon in disturbed areas recovered to pre-treatment levels within 20 years. So the samples we collected in 2022, just 14 years after treatment, could have already recovered the losses incurred by disturbance. This was good news for TNC and land managers and suggested that treatments at least had no negative affect on carbon sequestration.