Lupine was the first plant to colonize the Pumice Plain at Mount St. Helens in June, 1982. Photo of a lupine today by Carri LeRoy.
Hello Ecology Enthusiasts!
To honor the 40th anniversary of the Mount St. Helens eruption our team will be hosting a glimpse into the amazing work and research we’ve been able to be a part of on the beautiful landscape of MSH. Join us in our daily postings to learn more about what our team has been up to!
The Prairie Lupine
After the devastating event of the May 18, 1980 eruption, the mountain was laid bare. Just two years following the eruption, scientists found the first plant to colonize the Pumice Plain, the Prairie lupine (Lupinuslepidus). These beautiful purple flowers sparked excitement in the world of ecology and studies on early succession in areas followingdisturbance.
Stay tuned for tomorrow’s content and dive deeper into our field work at Mount St. Helens!
The Leaf Litter Lab had the honor of presenting a small glimpse into each individual scopes of research to Christine Hoffmann, who works for the Public Relations Outreach here at Evergreen.
With focuses on the National Science Foundation-funded ecology research of Mount St. Helen’s, undergraduates have been able to take on multiple approaches to conduct individual research projects.
Iris Garthwaite is a Senior who takes on both a peer-mentor and leadership role. She’s conducted an entire project around willow catkin and aquatic invertebrate interactions to investigate flowers as detrital resource for stream ecosystems. With the end of her research project she has been working hard at picking a graduate school and writing her first first-author paper!
Brandy speaking about the Norman H. Anderson macro-invertebrate samples.
Brandy Kamakawiwoole is a Junior working on aquatic macro-invertebrate sorting, stream GIF imaging, and analyzing historical BMI records. The historical records are from the 1981-1982 Norman H. Anderson Collection Samples, making them the first aquatic macro-invertebrate samples collected following the eruption of Mount St. Helens!
Angie Frödin-Morgensen is a Senior who has an interest in freshwater ecology. She spends most her time working hard at a microscope sorting through leaf litter to identify aquatic macro-invertebrates. Her research focuses on macro-invertebrate community differences between female and male Sitka willow leaf litter!
Angie discussing the important roles of macro-invertebrates as bio-indicators of streams.
Maddie Thompson is a Junior with interest in environment studies and ecology. She’s been continuing the research on canopy covering influencing in-stream ecosystem function. She also takes part in her research project that focuses on Willow DNA extractions to identify microbial communities.
Lauren Thompson is a Junior studying ecology and environmental studies. She’s continuing the research on how environmental conditions influence organic matter processing across Mount St. Helens watersheds. She works jointly with Maddie in assessing condensed tannin’s and Willow DNA extractions.
Stay tuned… Iris, Angie, Maddie and Lauren plan to attend and present at the 2020 Society for Freshwater Science Annual Meeting!
Dr. Carri LeRoy and research students navigating through a stream of Mount St. Helens.
Check out our latest paper “Plant sex influences aquatic-terrestrial interactions” featuring undergraduate co-authors!!
Learn more about the awesome collaborative work NSF funded student-faculty scientists are working on how sex of dioecious Sitka willows influences aquatic-terrestrial interactions in early successional headwater streams of Mount St. Helens.
Congratulations to one of our L3 labbers Iris Garthwaite on all her hard work during Fall Quarter! So exciting to see her research put into a phenomenal presentation, she absolutely rocked it.
Stay tuned for more of her amazing work she’s been doing Winter Quarter!
This is Iris and she studies imperfect flowers. And we love it!!
See our most up-to-date posts and tweets we think are important enough to re-tweet. Follow these science-focused twitter accounts to hear from undergraduate students and faculty involved in this research:
Emily Wolfe (Evergreen grad ’16) just published research that she started in the Evergreen program “Environmental Analysis, 2014-15” in the journal Oikos. The research shows that a fungal endophyte, Rhytisma punctatum, which infects bigleaf maple leaves as big black “tarspots” can influence the rate at which the leaf decomposes and can alter the in-stream microbial (bacterial and fungal) communities. Emily learned leaf litter methodology and then went on to do amplicon sequencing of the microbial community growing on the leaves. She is now enrolled as a PhD candidate at Portland State University and is doing her dissertation on endophytes more broadly. She credits her time in EA and as a Summer Undergraduate Research Fellow (SURF) while at Evergreen with giving her the tools to succeed in graduate school.
You can find the paper at the publisher’s website: https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/oik.05619
You can request a .pdf of the paper by writing to leroyc [at] evergreen [dot] edu.
This is our new blog site for highlighting undergraduate research experiences at Evergreen! Many of the students posting here have been involved in a large-scale research project at Mount St. Helens funded by the National Science Foundation (DEB #1836387). https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1836387
