Colorado Project

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).

Rocky Mountain National Park is concerned about it because they are so close to Denver and Fort Collins and receive a large amount of nitrogen from there (atmospherically).  It's also an area that's used to very little nitrogen so even relatively small increases can have substantial effects.  So they've been studying increasing nitrogen there for the last 20 years.  In the last 15 years they been purposely increasing the amount of nitrogen on a set of plots to see what happens when you push the area to nitrogen saturation.  In the last year they noticed an interesting soil layer that developed at one of the sites.  So my project will be looking at how this layer is affecting now nutrients are stored (or lost) in the soil.  I'll be trekking up the site and taking soil samples, surveying similar plots for the same layer, and looking at how water and nitrogen travels through the soil when it has the layer.  So that's the project in the a nutshell.  The side benefits are living for free in the park, getting funding for traveling to conferences in the future, and getting the opportunity to run a research project that I organized.

Comments

[Proud Father-in-Law]

To My Favorite Daughter-in-Law,

Please forgive me for tooting your horn to our family and friends. I'm so proud of both of you.

And I understand you explanation. We're going to expect pictures.

Love,
Richard
(Hopefully, your favorite F-i-L)

[Sabrina]

Don't worry about tooting the horn, we've actually gotten a few questions from others as well. And besides you're my only father-in-law.

[Father-in-Law]

Oh.

[james levendosky]

now THIS is a very informative and easily digested piece of writing for a layperson to science like me! i hadnt even THOUGHT of nitrogen as regards its effects on the environment. you introduced the prospect of nitrogens effect on the environment with such facility! also, that the west developed in a nitrogen deficient way, and thats NATURAL to the west, and so its the perfect spot to monitor for the effects of nitrogen introduction seems very critical, almost a salient moment for the study of cause and effect re our environment. i think this must be important work! and i commend you on getting this assignmnet, and i know you will do well! watch yer top knot out there in the wilds! be well jleven