So I've gotten a lot of questions about what I will be doing on Colorado during the summer. Since I have a tendency to get too technical, I'll try my best to explain the project since part of the fellowship is to develop my skills to explain it people who aren't as familiar with ecosystem ecology. So here it goes:
So there's a lot of attention being given to the rise in carbon dioxide in the atmosphere from human sources (global warming and such), but humans also release a good amount of other things as well, one of which is excess nitrogen. Now nitrogen can be good, it's needed to help plants grow, it's important for all the little things that live underground, and it's important for making proteins. But too much, like most things, is not always a good thing. The Western United States is an area that is limited in the amount of nitrogen available to living things, but it's also a place that's developed under such conditions. So there's a big push to understand how excessive amounts of nitrogen affect ecosystems and most of what has been found hasn't been good. Trees start having problems defending themselves against things like bark beetles (which occur naturally in forests) and disease. Grasslands start increasing and replacing natural flowering plants, and waterways suffer from bursts of microbial activity from excess nitrogen in runoff waters (and this can make it harder for other plants and animals to live there as well).
Continue reading "Colorado Project" »
There are points in time when I really do think I've been time-warped back in time and have to deal with the petty nonsense that used to plague me when I was a young awkward teenager. When people would discover your insecurities and play them up to make them look cool and you look stupid by comparison. There are time when the self-doubt would just creep into your subconscious and make you wonder if it was even worth it to keep going because the slightest misstep would be read completely wrong. I remember being a freshman in high school, in swimming for PE, and having to find a place on the wall of the pool with 50 other high school students and I accidently kicked a girl trying to squeeze into a place. She promptly started a rumor that I kicked her because I was gay and couldn't keep my hands off other girls. It crushed me and was one of those situations where the more you fought it the more other people thought you were just in denial about the truth.
Continue reading "Are we in junior high?" »
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