Rebecca Sanders-DeMott

Today I collected lots and lots of leaves from all the saplings in our climate change project here at Hubbard Brook.  In this experiment we have lots of individual young trees which are experiencing temperature manipulations in both summer and winter.  One of our hypotheses is that these treatments will affect the productivity of these trees.  One really great way to measure productivity is to collect all the leaves that fall off of trees in the autumn.  I placed netting around each individual tree so that I could get productivity estimate from individual! Since it has been so rainy for the past two weeks, the leaves are a little bit wet.  I’ve set them out to dry in paper bags on the porch at Pleasant View Farm.  (There is one bag per tree, and this isn’t even 50% of them!)  Once they are air-dry, I’ll bring them back to the lab and oven-dry them remove any remaining water.  Then I will weigh them and find out the dry mass of leaves produced this year by every single sapling.