A Day in My Life in Barnard’s Summer Research Institute
Identifying bird calls, collecting fungi samples, and aging ancient fossils may not be required for every degree at Barnard, but in the Environmental Science Department, hands-on fieldwork opportunities are endless. In the Summer Research Institute (SRI)—Barnard’s 10-week paid research program—STEM students can dedicate their summer to a local fieldwork or lab work topic of their choosing. While some students’ research work may contribute to a passion project of theirs or their mentor’s, students writing a senior thesis often complete their thesis research during their time in the Summer Research Institute.
During my first year at Barnard, I took Columbia’s ‘Earth's Environmental Systems: The Climate System’ class and became interested in carbon sequestration and climate change mitigation. I learned years ago that trees converted atmospheric carbon dioxide into oxygen through photosynthesis, but I never truly understood the global impact of that carbon dioxide’s final destination within a tree. Forests are one of the largest carbon sinks in the world, meaning they clean up carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and store it away for good.
Just one-and-a-half hours on the Metro-North Railroad can take you to Black Rock Forest in Cornwall, NY—Barnard’s research forest used for scientific fieldwork—where carbon sinking can be observed for almost 4,000 acres of trees. I spent my last two summers living at Black Rock Forest and researching sugar maple tree carbon storage with the Summer Research Institute. With the help of my mentors in Barnard’s Environmental Science Department and the Black Rock Forest staff, I designed and executed two full summers of fieldwork including felling and weighing twelve sugar maple trees, aligning their biomasses with an allometric equation of my own creation, and calculating my samples’ carbon storage amounts and past sequestration rates.
Although working towards a long-term research goal can sometimes feel daunting, each individual day of fieldwork at Black Rock Forest is filled with exciting wildlife surprises and opportunities to enjoy the mountains. While my fieldwork days last summer consisted of cutting down trees to weigh them in their entirety and oven-drying tree sample sections for my equation, I am spending this summer sanding tree ‘cookies’ to read the trees’ ages, developing my allometric equation, and calculating carbon sequestration rates.
Here is what a day in my life typically looks like:
8:00 a.m.: Wake up time! Our Summer Research Institute workdays are 9:00 a.m. Monday through Friday, and I am living with two other Barnard and Columbia environmental science researchers whom I carpool to the lab with around 8:45 a.m. Before we go, I always fill up both of my water bottles, supply my daypack with plenty of granola bars for extra energy out in the field, and eat a fried egg on sourdough toast (the perfect breakfast, in my opinion).
9:00 a.m.: The first thing I do each morning when I arrive at the lab is set up my research station. Since I am reading the tree rings of my twelve sample trees to determine their ages, I collected tree basal sections on-site after cutting the trees down. However, the chainsaw left deep gashes in my samples so I have been visiting Columbia’s Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory’s Tree Ring Lab to sand down their surfaces. Expert researchers at the Tree Ring Lab, such as Dr. Brendan Buckley and Dr. Hung Nguyen, taught me how to use a number of different sanding tools to bring out even the lightest and thinnest tree rings in my samples—sugar maple wood is notoriously difficult to read! Back at the Black Rock Forest lab, I set up my research station with 800-grit sandpaper for polishing, a microscope plugged into digital tree ring measuring software, my laptop, and freshly sharpened pencils for marking the century and decade-denoting rings on my samples.
9:30 a.m.: Before the afternoon heat sets in, I check in with a research mentor at Black Rock Forest to see if there are any extraneous fieldwork projects she would like me to help with. Recently, I have been contributing to a project aiming to map all of the invasive species across the Black Rock Forest. By dividing up the forest into hundreds of plots, researchers can assess how drastically invasive species have affected native species growth one subsection at a time. Once I enter a research plot, I record the major land features present, the dominant canopy and sub-canopy species, evidence of tree defoliation from caterpillars, and how many invasive species are present. Researchers also randomly select areas within the plots to assess native tree sapling growth, which could provide evidence that the invasive species have not yet overtaken the area. I enjoy working on this project because it can require miles of exploring, and during late July, I keep an eye out for the blooming blueberry, blackberry, black raspberry, and wineberry bushes!
11:30 a.m.: Lucky for me and the other student researchers, Subway and Dunkin are only a 10-minute drive away. On days when I wake up too late to pack a lunch, I treat myself to an Italian Herb and Cheese 6” sub with a frozen caramel coffee from next door. Once we return to join the Black Rock Forest staff at the outdoor picnic tables, I turn on the Merlin Bird ID app’s Sound ID feature to see how many bird species are enjoying our lunch break with us. These days, my favorite bird to hear is the Indigo Bunting.
12:15 p.m.: By the afternoon, I am grateful to avoid the heat and focus on my own research project indoors! Using the dry biomasses of my tree samples from last summer, I am developing an allometric equation to estimate the biomasses of sugar maple trees in Black Rock Forest per their diameters. Every tree species grows and stores carbon at a different rate, and allometric equations can estimate both biomass and carbon storage amount (by applying a carbon factor) with just a diameter-at-breast-height measurement. Although I had to cut down trees for my study, my new allometric equation will help researchers and forest managers quantitatively understand the importance of sugar maple trees so that they will (hopefully) not be cut down in the future. Sugar maples are the fourth most abundant tree species in the eastern U.S., and their habitat is at risk of drying out due to global warming. With a quantified capacity to sequester carbon, I hope that my allometric equation will mathematically stress the sugar maples’ role in combating climate change. Both Excel and R have equation development tools, and R even has an allometry package which I have been investigating.
2:00 p.m.: I move to tree ring counting after a few hours of equation development each day. My twelve sugar maple samples range in diameter from ~2 cm to ~55 cm, and from 11 years old to 148 years old (as I have now discovered)! When I get frustrated with one sample, I just move to the next for a bit! Some samples are perfectly round while others are oblong and rotted in the center, and my tree ring widths range from ~0.01 mm to ~5cm. Each tree ring has a light and a dark section which represent a year’s spring wood and late summer wood which turned into bark to protect the tree throughout the winter. As I mentioned, sugar maple wood is notoriously light, making my samples more challenging to read than Eastern Hemlock rings, for example. I always keep my 800-grit sandpaper on hand to smooth out any microscopic scratches! Once I know my trees’ ages, I can divide their carbon storage amounts by their ages to calculate their past average carbon sequestration rates.
4:00 p.m.: Summer Research Institute is 35-hour-a-week meaning I leave work at 4:00 p.m. and still have daylight hours to go swimming. Black Rock Forest’s Sutherland Pond has public swimming access and ample blueberry bushes on its shoreline. I keep a swimsuit, a towel, my crossword book, and my speaker in my roommate’s car just in case the afternoon ends up being sunny!
5:30 p.m.: Once we have made our mark on the blueberry bushes, and the bullfrogs start hunting for their evening meals, my housemates and I return home to cook dinner. I definitely miss the convenience of living above a grocery store back in the city, but living in a remote area has given me the chance to improve my cooking skills. My favorite meals to make are chicken piccata, baked salmon with roasted carrots, and hot honey garlic chicken. After dinner, I often set up my hammock in the trees by my house and catch up with friends out of state via FaceTime.
8:30 p.m.: My housemates and I have recently become invested in “Wingspan,” a bird-oriented board game where players develop their own flock. Wingspan even has an Indigo Bunting card to collect! One round of Wingspan only takes about an hour, but my housemates and I often keep playing until we start yawning. When I fall asleep before midnight, I wake up fully rested for another full day of fieldwork!
To see a day in my life as a researcher in action, check out my @Barnardadmissions Instagram story highlight from June 20, 2023—Thanks for reading!