I Passed!

Yes, that's right, I passed the oral defense of my thesis and am officially a Dr.

Alesa gave me one half of one single day to declare that I was smarter than her. That was yesterday afternoon. This morning she greeted me by exclaiming that she was once again much smarter than I.

I'll give you the short version: I did my thesis research on the effects of moose browsing on the boreal forests of Isle Royale National Park, MI, USA. In particular, I studied how changes in the moose population density of Isle Royale influences landscape distributions of their browsing and subsequent impacts on plant communities and nutrient cycling. This involved a number of great trips to Isle Royale to collect data on where and how much moose eat and the effects of their browsing on plant canopies, patches, and landscapes.

Over the past few years the moose population of Isle Royale has declined to its lowest density in 50 years. Landscape patterns of available browse and consumed browse became decoupled from each other, and the plant community started to grow back and form either distinct patches across the landscape or random distributions.

Using estimates of browse consumption from previous years when the moose population was larger, I studied how much moose browsing is too much moose browsing for plants to sustain positive growth. It turns out that the effects of moose browsing on the growth and development of individual plants can influence the way that moose move through and forage across large landscapes that they and other moose have altered.

All of this happens because moose are incredibly large animals and require so much food every day. A single moose can take as many as 4000 bites of plant tissue in a single day! Now imagine 1000-2000 moose on an island about 45 miles long and 9 miles wide!

At any rate, here are a couple of pics.

The forests....

Field Working....
View from camp....
I'll sure miss the place