Mentorship

Working with partners in the USFS and NOAA, 3rd year PSU student Aiden Gifford has joined the team to use tree-ring records to better understand fire history across New Hampshire. Aiden has participated in field collection of fire-scarred trees and is now working with local dendrochronologist, Dr. Christopher Guiterman, to process the samples, analyze them, and composite them into records of fire frequency (and potentially records of climate and other environmental conditions as well).

Lucas Robdau, working with Dr. Pendleton, and collaborators from UNH (Dr. Joseph Licciardi) has joined the effort to utilize cosmogenic radionuclide exposure dating on boulders left behind by the Laurentide Ice Sheet as it retreated northward across New England following the last glacial maximum. Though a newcomer to the technique, Lucas is putting his deep local knowledge of New Hampshire mountains to use identifying sampling locations and collecting samples. Lucas will be involved in sample processing and data analysis during his next year at PSU.

Plymouth State University student Jennifer Limoges joins us from the chemistry department to take on our pilot reconstructions of climate from recently retrieved sediment cores from Cone Pond in Thornton, NH. In the summer of 2023, Jennifer traveled to CU Boulder in Colorado to work with collaborators, specifically to analyze lake core sediments for brGDGTs and hydrogen isotopes. These biomarkers will help her to reconstruct temperature and precipitation trends, respectively.

Working with Dr. Pendleton, Ryley, an Environmental Science and Policy student at PSU, helped bring a paleo-charcoal analysis laboratory online here at PSU. Ryley assisted in designing and refining laboratory protocols. She also performed the very first in-house charcoal analyses to produce a paleo-fire record from a central New Hampshire bog.