Graduate Student Profiles

Advisor: Jess Ernakovich
Research Topic: Microbial Community Assembly & Dynamics under Climate Change-Induced Disturbances in Arctic Permafrost
Email: Adeena.Ahsan@unh.edu
Research Description: My research focuses on studying the microbial community dynamics in the thawing permafrost to better understand the ecological and evolutionary drivers shaping microbial community assembly and decomposition functional capabilities and combines wet lab techniques with bioinformatics to analyze microbial communities. 

Advisor: Serita Frey
Research Topic: Impact of Soil Warming on Soil Microbial Recovery From Stress Events
Email: Gretchen.Bahmueller@unh.edu
Research Description: My research focuses on understanding the impact of long-term soil warming on the ability of soil microorganisms to recover from additional stress like drought and freeze-thaw cycles. With a background in sustainable agriculture and food systems, I am interested in soil microorganisms and their importance in sustainable agricultural systems.

Advisor: Rich Smith
Research Topic: Greenhouse Gas Emissions from Soils in Agricultural Ecosystems
Email: Kayleigh.Hummel@unh.edu 
Research Description: My research focuses on the effects of climate change on soil greenhouse gas emissions from agricultural fields. Specifically, I am interested in how cover cropping might mitigate or exacerbate emissions during freeze-thaw events, when soil cycles between frozen (inactive) and thawed (active) states.

Advisor: Adam Wymore
Research Topic: Watershed dynamics and climate change
Email: Morgubatul.Jannat@unh.edu
Research Description: My research focuses on understanding the complex interactions between watershed processes and climate change, particularly how forests, landscapes, and climatic variations influence water quality. By utilizing long-term datasets spanning tropical to temperate regions, the study will examine key water quality parameters such as discharge, nutrients, sediments and dissolved organic matter. The research leverages data from various hydrological observatories equipped with continuous monitoring systems. This study aims to reveal patterns in watershed responses to changing environmental conditions and contribute to sustainable water resource management under future climate scenarios.

Advisor: Shannon Rogers
Research Topic: Environmental Volunteering
Email: Charlotte.Thompson@unh.edu
Research Description: Environmental volunteers are essential to effective management of conservation land in the United States. Nature Groupie, a project of UNH Extension, is an online event calendar that any organization in NH and beyond can use to recruit volunteers. Organizations share their volunteer events to the website and prospective volunteers receive a weekly newsletter highlighting upcoming events. Since 2014, there have been over 11,000 volunteer sign-ups through the website across over 400 different organizations. My research will use this data set of volunteers and events provides to understand patterns in volunteer behavior and effective volunteer recruitment strategies at a broad scale.

Advisor: Wil Wollheim
Research Topic: Aquatic nitrogen dynamics in response to storm events
Email: Joseph.Baldus@unh.edu 
Research Description: I am researching how storm-driven pulses of nitrogen move through a watershed, especially comparing across various land-uses. My research is focused on College Brook, the stream flowing right through campus, in part to inform a planned restoration project to 'daylight' an underground portion of the stream and restore the stream's ability to store and process surges of stormwater.

Advisor: Serita Frey
Research Topic: Tuberculate ectomycorrhiza of Quercus rubra under warming soils.
Email: Andre.Chiang@unh.edu
Research Description: My research is focused around developing an understanding of functionality and frequency of Tuberculate Ectomycorrhiza (TECM) of Quercus rubra within the context of simulated climatic warming. TECM are spherical aggregations of fine roots that are colonized by ectomycorrhizal fungi, typically occurring within the organic horizon of soil.

Advisor: Scott Ollinger
Research Topic: Long-Term Patterns in Forest Productivity and Nitrogen Status in a Northeastern Temperate Forest
Email: Arielle.Kotulak@unh.edu 
Research Description: I'm studying patterns in wood growth and nitrogen status across a range of forest types in a White Mountain forest by resampling a network of compositionally diverse plots that were last sampled more than 25 years ago. The goal of this project is to investigate whether observed long-term trends in wood growth and various nitrogen status indicators are consistent with current ecological hypotheses, particularly those related to widespread N availability decline.

Advisor: Adam Wymore
Research Topic: Spatial variation in nitrogen wet deposition
Email: Paola.MiramontesGonzalez@unh.edu
Research Description: My research focuses on studying spatial variability in nitrogen compounds from the atmosphere that are deposited to the Earth's surface through precipitation. Understanding nitrogen wet deposition is crucial for managing its impacts on terrestrial and aquatic environments, especially in the context of changing atmospheric nitrogen levels due to human activities and climate change.

Advisors: Lindsey Williams and Shannon Rogers
Research Topic: Understanding Indicators of Social Change in Coastal Watershed Communities
Email: Katri.Gurney@unh.edu 
Research Description: My research is based in the communities of the Great Bay Watershed. I am building off of a recent collaborative effort to bridge human dimensions research and practice to better understand change over time when it comes to community demographics, connection to nature, perceptions of water quality, willingness to take conservation action, and stewardship behaviors.

Advisor: Adrienne Kovach 
Research Topic: Wildlife and Conservation Biology 
UNH Email: Carson.Madigan@unh.edu 
Research Description: My research is focused on determining the amount of New England cottontails across multiple landscapes in Western Connecticut. I use non-invasive genetic sampling of cottontail fecal pellets to identify individual rabbits. Using this individual identification and sampling arrays across their habitat, I model density of the New England cottontail populations. Comparing this New England cottontail density to vegetation variables helps us better understand how the species varies across its range and allows for better conservation management.