Soil Pit in Bartlett,
New Hampshire
Northern Blazing Star - Kennebunk, Maine
Block Island, Rhode Island
Sugarloaf Mtn, Maine
My primary role in the Hamburg lab is to coordinate field work, data sharing, and sample analysis and archiving for the Northern Hardwood Forest Nutrient Cycling Project. This project, which is being conducted in the White Mountains of New Hampshire, investigates the changes in the cycling of base cations in the northern hardwood forest as a stand ages after a clearcut or other disturbance.
I am also interested in questions of land use history, current land use change, and climate change on forested ecosystems and rare species. Land use history has profound impacts on the functioning of ecosystems, and I am currently working on designing a project in which I will create a GIS database of 150 years of land use history in Grafton County, NH, and use it to refine estimates of rates of carbon sequestration in the region. I'm also interested in climate change and how it will interact with other disturbances in determining the characterisitics future forests.
For my senior thesis, I constructed a GIS model of habitat for northern blazing star (Liatris scariosa var. novae-angliae), a rare grassland species, on Block Island, RI, with the goal of determining how the The Nature Conservancy's Block Island Program addresses the long-term viability of the speceis on the island. I also have an ongoing field experiment in Maine (in cooperaton with The Nature Conservancy in Maine and the Schmitt Lab at Brown), collecting demographic data for a northern blazing star population under various management strategies.
More Information:
Contact:
Matt Vadeboncoeur
Box 1943, Brown University
Providence, RI 02912
envstudies@brown.edu
phone: 401.863.3445
fax: 401.863.2700