Past research: Summer internships and M.Sc. thesis project
NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates at El Verde Field Station in Puerto Rico (2010).
This was my first official ecological research experience in a tropical forest. I conducted a summer census of >11,000 seedlings across the Luquillo Forest Dynamics Plot to look at the relationships between mortality and soil moisture, rock cover, and topography. We found that decreased soil moisture was associated to increased seedling mortality for some tree species. |
Boston University's Summer Undergraduate Fellowship Program and Harvard Forest (2011).
I worked with Drs. Pamela Templer and Andy Reinmann to measure stem respiration of Red Maple and Red Oak trees in a snow-removal experiment at Harvard Forest. We measured stem respiration in trees located in snow-removal and control plots, as well as at 4 different heights along the trunk. We hypothesized that stem respiration would decrease in the snow-removal plots due to increased soil frost, but that stem respiration would increase with trunk height due to the upward transport of dissolved CO2 in sap flow. |
Undergraduate and M.S. Project at UPR-Río Piedras, in association with the International Institute of Tropical Forestry. I worked with Drs. Tana E. Wood and Ariel E. Lugo to measure the magnitude of soil respiration in a subtropical moist (and novel) forest in northern karst belt of Puerto Rico. For more than 3 years, we had 6 automated chambers measuring soil respiration each hour providing us with long-term data at high temporal resolution. This allowed us to detect temporal patterns of soil respiration at both seasonal and diel time-scales, which are described and related to other measured variables in two papers that have been published in JGR-Biogeosciences and Ecology and Evolution.
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