Environmental Internship Program - 2022 Booklet

BIODIVERSITY AND
CONSERVATION
Helen Brush ’24
ECOLOGY AND EVOLUTIONARY BIOLOGY
Certificate: Applied and Computational
Mathematics
PROJECT TITLE
Seasonality of Plant
Interactions in a Changing
Arctic
ORGANIZATION(S)
Levine Lab,
Department of Ecology
and Evolutionary Biology,
Princeton University
LOCATION(S)
Toolik Field Station,
Fairbanks, Alaska
MENTOR(S)
Jonathan Levine,
Professor of Ecology and
Evolutionary Biology;
Ruby An, Ph.D. candidate,
Ecology and Evolutionary
Biology
I worked at Toolik Field Station in the Alaskan
arctic to investigate how tundra plants use the
growing season. This project is important both
as a tool for better understanding plant ecology
and in the context of the rapidly changing arctic
climate. As growing seasons change, tundra
plants may change how they use available time,
potentially changing community interactions
and composition, and this may in turn have
important implications for global carbon cycling.
I made frequent phenological measurements
(i.e., measurements of different stages of a plant’s
lifecycle) of 180 individually tagged plants from
six common species. These data create a picture
of when different plant species are active. I
helped with preliminary data processing and
used longer term datasets to explore weather
patterns at Toolik. A better understanding of
the seasonality of tundra plants will require
integrating weather and ecological data. In
addition to the work, I thoroughly enjoyed
walking through the tundra with other members
of the Toolik community and speculating about
ecological and biological questions. I plan to
carry the curiosity that I exercised this summer
into the rest of my education and work, and I
hope to pursue further research through both
fieldwork and theoretical modeling projects. I
am grateful to have had the privelege to spend
my summer in awe inspiring wilderness with
wonderful people.
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