Posted: January 20, 2022
Both students accomplished an incredibly hard feat, especially given they were in graduate school during COVID.
MS students Emily Lesher and Sam Bayuzick graduated in Fall 2021. Emily's research was part of a collaboration with Ian Thomas in the UK (formerly of UC Dublin and Teagasc in Ireland), Faruk Djodjic (Upsala Univ in Sweden), Pete Kleinman (USDA-ARS), Jen Weld (Penn State) at the WE-38 watershed in Pennsylvania. Emily developed Critical Source Area models and evaluated their use in predicting areas of high runoff and soil phosphorus. She compared those to the P-Index and evaluated how the two techniques differed guiding phosphorus management. Sam explored legacy landscape effects on soils and hydrology from the creation of charcoal hearths in Pennsylvania to support iron and lime production in the 19th century. Sam developed new geospatial approaches for finding hearths using LiDAR terrain data and conducted an extensive sampling campaign of soil and field hydrology to quantify differences in hearth soil compared to adjacent non-hearth soils. Sam worked with colleagues of ours at Brandenburg University of Technology Cottbus - Senftenberg (Thomas Raab, Alexander Bonhage and Florian Hirsch). Graduate school and COVID can be rough (maybe that's an understatement) and both Sam and Emily did an amazing job. We wish them the best.
