Most graduate students and postdoctoral researchers in the lab develop their own projects separate from Kathy’s work.  Here is a sampling of some of our ongoing projects:

• Science communication.

We have two primary projects involving science communication, led by Andy Vacca and Kaitlin McDonald. Andy’s dissertation included work to evaluate how harmful phytoplankton blooms are portrayed by the newspaper media, while Kaitlin led a successful research proposal to Facebook to determine whether micro-influencers can be deployed to inform social media users about ticks and tick-borne disease using the principles of Inoculation Theory (per Dartmouth colleague Josh Compton).

• Evaluating the distribution and abundance of ticks in the Upper Valley – and thinking about the community context in which ticks occur.

Kaitlin McDonald is sampling ticks at multiple sites in forested, transitional, and meadow sites to determine what environmental factors correlate with tick abundance in space and time. She’s also working with our ecology teaching staff to determine whether camera traps can be used to evaluate meso-predator abundance and thus top-down pressure on key tick hosts, like mice and chipmunks.

• Evaluating how thermal environments affect the performance of individual organisms and populations.
  

  Eastern brook trout during spawning in the Dead Diamond Driver (photo by Keith Fristchie)

  Grad student Keith Fritschie has established a research program to understand how stream temperatures — as influenced by groundwater inputs — impact the very early life history of native brook trout in the streams of Vermont and New Hampshire.  See Keith’s website for more details.

• Determining the effects of road salt on freshwater lakes.
  

  Sampling the salinity experiment during Summer 2018 – having fun despite the rain (photo by Alex Conway).

  Former postdoctoral researcher Jennie Brentrup and undergraduate Alexandra Conway ’20 conducted a field mesocosm experiment to study how increased salinity impacts the structure of freshwater zooplankton communities.  Jennie also worked with David Lutz in Environmental Studies and undergraduate Rafa Rosas ’20 to build low-cost conductivity data logging stations that can be deployed year-round to track pulses in salt concentration following wintertime rain-on-snow events and during spring snowmelt.