Comments (0) | |

Sunday, Nov. 08, 2009

Survey tries to measure environmental benefit of Wesleyan’s vegetation

Photosynthesis. It’s how plants get energy from sunlight. It’s also one of the first really impressive science words we learn in elementary school.

In high school, we learn that plants take carbon dioxide from the atmosphere and give off oxygen, storing carbon in the process. But exactly how much carbon does a plant remove from the air? That’s an advanced science fair experiment.

Consider this question: how much carbon dioxide do all the plants on a 200-acre college campus remove from the atmosphere?

That’s a humdinger of a science problem, but that’s exactly what Wesleyan College is trying to find out.

The question is more than academic. Carbon dioxide traps heat in the atmosphere through something called the greenhouse effect, and many scientists believe carbon dioxide from the burning of fossil fuels is contributing to global warming.

“We’re working on reducing our impact on the environment in terms of the emission of greenhouse gases,” said Wesleyan environmental science professor Venus Roberts.

Roberts is leading a project called Tree Hug & Measure, which aims to find out how much carbon is absorbed by the greenery on Wesleyan’s Forsyth Road campus. Saturday, about 30 students, teachers and community volunteers participated in the first stage of the project.

It involved using global positioning devices to locate randomly selected tenth-of-an-acre plots, counting the trees there and measuring their heights and the diameters of their trunks.

Roberts said the project is related to Wesleyan’s participation in the American College & University Presidents’ Climate Commitment, a movement to stop global warming. The project was funded by a grant from the Georgia Forestry Commission.

Wesleyan recruited volunteers for Saturday’s work session through advertisements.

“Many hands make light work, right?” said Roberts.

Kay Hricik of Macon was one of the community volunteers who came out on a bright, crisp morning for some arboreal assessment. She brought her 9-year-old daughter, Abby, to expose her to real-life science.

“I’m learning a lot,” Kay Hricik said. “It’s interesting how much goes into the data collection, how thorough it is.”

Abby, a fourth-grader at Stratford Academy, said “I like doing it and coming up with crazy ideas.”

Abby said the hardest part was “figuring out the height — it’s kind of confusing.”

Coleen Lewis and Soshawn Blair, both Wesleyan juniors from Jamaica, volunteered Saturday because they’re active in the college’s “going green” projects. They said Wesleyan recently dispensed with trays in the dining hall to conserve the water needed to wash them and to reduce the food waste they encouraged. The college business office also abolished paper checks, requiring all transactions to be electronic.

Blair, a biology and chemistry major, said another reason she volunteered was “we get to do field work, which is always a plus on your résumé.”

Wesleyan biology professor Jim Ferrari trained the volunteers how to make the necessary measurements, which included the size of the tree’s leaf canopy, the “percent missing” of the canopy, the canopy’s light exposure and the position of the tree in relation to the center of the circular plot.

The measurements required specialized tools such as clinometers, which help calculate tree height by measuring angles of elevation, “Biltmore sticks,” which provide a shortcut for measuring trunk diameters, and special tape measures calibrated in inches multiplied by pi, which, as a math teacher will tell you, will give you a diameter when you measure a circumference.

“It’s painstaking more than it is difficult,” Ferrari said.

He said the project might not be completed until the spring.

You can’t make measurements in the winter because all the leaves have to be on the trees.

After all the data are collected, Wesleyan will send the info to an organization in Syracuse, N.Y., that has a computer model that can use it to compute the carbon-catching capability of Wesleyan’s trees.