Submitted by Todd Dawson on
The Dawson Lab would like to collaborate with proactive and excited undergraduates who are interested in examining plant physiology, spectroscopy, and aerial imagery to understand the effects of various treatments on the chemical compositions of native Californian vegetation. The undergraduate students will be asked to assist in the facilitation of several treatments (watering, desiccating, adding nutrients) to plants of different functional types (example: grasses, scrub, forbs, conifers, oaks), which will be housed in the greenhouse and on the roof of VLSB. The students will also collect vegetation samples and analyze chemical properties (water, nitrogen, and chlorophyll content) and spectral signatures (using a mass spectrometer) of the samples in the Dawson Lab in VLSB. The graduate student on this project will fly a drone over the vegetation weekly to analyze the spectral differences resulting from the various treatments, and compare these differences to the chemical analyses performed in the lab. Given the undergraduate students’ skills and interests, they may also assist in drone image processing and vegetation classifications. This experiment is part of a larger project called the California Heartbeat Initiative (CHI) Freshwater in which researchers are assessing water content in vegetation at several UC reserves using ground-based sensors and drones. This experiment will assist the CHI-Freshwater project calibrate and interpret spectral and chemical characteristics captured in drone images taken throughout California.
Undergraduate roles include plant cultivation, chemical analysis of vegetation samples, and potential image analysis. The students will be asked to facilitate various treatments each week to the vegetation in this experiment. These include watering, desiccating, adding nutrients, and maintaining a control for about 80 plants that will be housed in the VLSB greenhouse and on the rooftop. The undergraduate students will also collect leaf samples to analyze water, nitrogen, and chlorophyll content of the vegetation functional groups in the Dawson Lab in VLSB. Finally, if students have image processing experience, they may assist the graduate student in analyzing spectral differences and conducting vegetation classifications of drone images in a program such as ArcPro, ENVI, and Pix4D.
A background in forestry, GIS, geography, ecology, or similar fields welcome, and plant physiology, spectroscopy, and stable isotope analysis a plus.