As of this spring, Christy Tyler and Greg Hoch are the new co-chairs of the graduate student committee.
Christy is working on her Ph.D. with Karen McGlathery at the University of Virginia. Her dissertation concerns the role of macroalgae in transformations of nitrogen, particularly organic nitrogen, in a shallow coastal lagoon at the Virginia Coast Reserve.
Greg is a Ph.D. student working with John Briggs at Kansas State University. The focus of his research is using remote sensing and Geographic Information Systems to study the expansion of eastern red cedar forests into the tallgrass prairie of the Flint Hills region.
Both Christy and Greg will serve as co-chairs through August of 2000. In addition, we now have a full complement of student representatives from all 21 sites, who will serve as the liaisons between the individual sites and the graduate student committee chairs.
At the Ecological Society Meeting in Baltimore, August 1998, we held a successful meeting of LTER students. Fourteen LTER sites were represented and we heard presentations from many of the students about the current research at these sites. Students at the meeting were encouraged to pursue cross-site research. Interested students should first contact the site where they wish to do cross-site work, and then arrange with the LTER Network Office for additional logistical support if necessary. We will be holding another meeting at next year’s ESA in Spokane, and hope to incorporate more students from the ESA community.
The graduate student committee is starting to prepare a variety of student activities for the Y2K LTER All Scientist’s Meeting at Snowbird. Potential activities include: informal lunches with the project PIs, establishing a student travel fund, a mentoring session to pair-up senior graduate students with new graduate students and undergraduates, and discussions about alternative career paths for graduate students and post-docs.
We are currently in the procees of updating the current student database, as well as creating a new, searchable database so that students with similar interests can interact more easily. We are looking forward to a significant student presence at the meeting.