Five Questions with environmental science student Bryan Mood
2012-09-18 11:54:46
Environmental science student Bryan Mood, from Yarmouth, NS, has spent the past two summers working in the Mount Allison Dendrochronolgy Lab (MAD Lab).
1 - You worked with Dr. Colin Laroque from Mount Allison and Dr. André Robichaud from Université du Moncton this past summer to develop a wood anatomy species key. What is this and why is it important?
At Mount Allison we have relatively easy access to a scanning electron microscope that is run by James Ehrman and we are using it to produce a species key with hundreds of different scanning electronic microscope photos of wood. Often with dendroarchaeology (the dating of old buildings and artifacts using tree-ring analysis) you do not know what species of wood you are working with. For example, you may be investigating wood from an old house and the wood does not have bark, which would help in identifying the species. Establishing the correct species is essential because you need to know which growth pattern of the different trees to use in your analysis. If you think it is one species and it is actually another, then your dating can be out by as many as one hundred years.
The species key helps us tell which species we are looking at and it will be available for everyone with web access to use, so other dendrochronologists across the region and country will have access to it.
2 - Explain your honours project.
Last summer I was hired at the MAD lab to write a web-based computer program for landowners in Saskatchewan. An owner can input information, such as where they live and what shelterbelt tree species they want to plant, then the program produces a graph that illustrates how their chosen species is projected to grow up to the year 2100. With this information the farmers can then plant appropriate species. However, we are missing some information in the program about how species will grow in specific locations of the province. My project this summer builds on this work.
My honours project looks at white spruce growth in shelterbelts throughout Saskatchewan and specifically on how and why the tree species growth changes from the eastern to western and northern to southern boundaries of the province. I got this idea from a paper I was reading about the importance of spatial connections in tree-ring analysis. I am very interested in including spatial dimensions into this larger project, as it adds to the information gathered from the temporal component of the tree timelines.
3 - You have worked on many of different projects in the MAD lab, dating wood from a sunken ship, old houses, and trees from a national park, what is the most interesting project that you have worked on?
They have all been pretty interesting, but if I had to choose one it would be the dating the piece of the Titanic railing. We had to figure out whether it came from the Titanic, or the Lusitania. It was a curved object so we couldn’t treat it as we normally would. I was charged with figuring out how to flatten out a 3-dimensional object into a 2-dimensional object while keeping the ring-widths correctly spaced. The project had a special historical significance, while at the same time it was technically challenging.
4 - Why did you choose to study environmental science?
When I first came to Mount Allison I wanted to be an environmental lawyer and thought I would major in environmental studies. Then I took the first-year course “The Physical Environment” and I learned about glaciers. I thought glaciers were fantastic and I realized this is what I wanted to study. This was reinforced in my second year when a guest lecturer in another class, an expert on glaciers (Dr. Dan Smith from the University of Victoria), came to present to us. Hydrology, or water resources, also intrigue me. I did a project in “Research Methods in Environmental Science” course with Dr. Laroque in Jasper National Park on hydrology and the volume loss of a glacier.
In the future, I plan to do my masters and study dendroglaciology and dendroclimatology. I would like to look at how glaciers and the water they store are going to look in the future.
5 - What made you decide to come to Mount Allison?
In high school I sent many e-mails to different geography departments in Canada with questions about their programs, and Mount Allison professor Mike Fox was the only one to respond. Two high school teachers, whom I really respect, encouraged me to go to Mount Allison as well. They told me it was the place to be if you want to excel and explore your options.