Old Trees on South Hill
In my last semester at Ithaca College, I spent 6 hours a week traversing through the beautiful Ithaca College Natural Lands and (finally) getting to know them like I had never known them before. I walked and looked at each tree and hugged a few along the way. This research project was something completely new developed in the Spring of 2025, and I was in the first group of students that worked on this project. Since there isn't very much research and study done on old and ancient trees in this region of the world (or really anywhere), we were tasked with building our own understanding and relationship with old trees.
We surveyed the natural lands in all weather conditions - snow, rain, sun (although we did not get much of that in snowy Ithaca). We traversed all terrains from steep slopes of Plot one to marshy lands. Plot 1 especially tested us. Margot and I decided to survey it since it seemed like an easy one right on the border between built campus and the natural lands and seemed like a place with a lot of old trees based on older imagery. We did not anticipate just how steep the hill was and we slipped and sled through this plot, a little bit scared for our lives. We were quite literally clutching the trees we were recording so we wouldn't slip and fall. When our flagging tape slipped our of my hands, Margot came to the rescue and sat on the snow and slowly crouched all the way to bring it back so we could continue to mark the trees we saw!
I learnt a lot through this project, including how to build a database. A big part of this was standardizing data. As a team, we had to decide what information was important to capture and how 7 of us were each going to collect that information. We decided on gathering: DBH, species, features of old-growth, potential management needs, and location. After we were done with the surveying (which took a lot longer than we expected), we worked on a toolkit for management options for old trees and a guide to this research project (survey tips and google Earth how-to) so that we can pass on the valuable informtion and insight to the next group of reserchers!
The professor for this reserch project, Jason Hamilton, is a strong advocate for the importance of reflection and we were all required to submit a reflection on our takeaways from the research project. As someone who enjoys reflection herself, I found that this excercise helped me wrap up the semester beautifully. Here is the link to my reflection on this amazingly-eye-opening research project.