Our geo-science and environmental science students hail from a wide range of institutions and disciplines. All are interested in scientific research and are participating in our study of biogeochemical processes in northern upland and wetland ecosystems.
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Samantha Anderson University of New Hampshire Environmental Science major I'm currently studying Environmental Science focusing on ecosystems. I'm originally from a small suburban town in Cumberland, Rhode Island where the closest thing to a mountain is an ant hill. I have been a lab tech since the beginning of my sophomore year and have worked on various projects with climate change as the main focus. My current project is fine-scaling species composition in discontinuous permafrost at the Stordalen Mire in Abisko, Sweden. With the technology we have today I can use ROVs (remotely operated vehicles, in my case a helicopter) to determine species composition at the sub meter level obtaining infrared images, hopefully mapping out the entire ecosystem. This is important due to the fact that this type of scaling has never been applied to a mire ecosystem before. Knowing species composition we can then look at carbon and methane fluxes which are the leading gases that are driving climate change. Percent cover will be measured with a 8X8 1 meter quadrat in 5 site types across a gradient from low wetland to high palsa.
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