Ed Lindsey’s science classroom at Old Town High School was buzzing with life on Friday.
The half dozen students in his collaborative research class were moving between lab stations getting glass jars of the chemical mixture soda lime ready and preparing contraptions to place outside until the spring. Those contraptions will collect whatever the soil releases, which could tell us how climate change is affecting the ability of Maine’s forests to hold in carbon dioxide and, therefore, mitigate climate change.
The students’ field research is part of a collaboration with two researchers from the University of New Hampshire, Alexandra Contosta and Elizabeth Burakowski, who are relying on the students to care for the more sophisticated equipment they’ve placed behind Old Town High School and to collect crucial data.
Contosta and Burakowski are focused specifically on mud season and the “vernal window” — the time each year when the snow melts and tree canopies reappear. There’s a lot of water and nutrients moving around in the soils and watershed during this time, Burakowski said.
The soil is releasing a lot of carbon during this period. And as climate change lengthens mud season each year, that means the soils will let out more carbon. It could all mean the forests that are critical to keeping the level of carbon in the atmosphere at bay aren’t up to the task, Burakowski said.
On Friday, Lindsey’s students walked out to the spots in the woods behind their school to place the jars at eight different sites the researchers are monitoring. Once they reached the location, the students quickly took the tops off their jars before covering them with large plastic buckets and weighing them down with rocks.
The buckets create a sealed chamber that keeps in everything the soil breathes out, allowing the researchers to analyze whatever the contraptions collect. Lindsey jokingly referred to the contraption as “the $10 setup.”
There’s also higher-tech equipment at each of the sites that do essentially the same thing as the jar.
As Lindsey’s students track how climate change affects mud season, Contosta and Burakowski are doing related research into the vernal window phenomenon, Burakowski said.
“What we’re trying to understand is how the vernal window is affecting our forest ecosystems,” she said.
So far, they’ve found that the window is getting longer as the Earth’s climate continues to warm. That change is problematic for forest ecosystems because they’re accustomed to nutrients being delivered at certain times of year, Burakowski said.
The students care for the researchers’ equipment, and some, like Junior Keegan Plourde, have been able to build their own versions of these higher-tech setups for less money.
While the research on its own is important, Lindsey said it’s about giving students a taste of “real world” work.
“I hope they take away how number-driven science is, where the numbers come from and how hard they are to get,” he said. “I also like them to meet people [like the UNH researchers] from the real world — I hate that word — outside of the classroom.”
With the jars placed and secured, the students will leave them out for the winter and check on them every so often. In the spring the students will trek back out to the woods, collect the jars and weigh them. They’ll enter their data into a database other students have contributed to since 2018.
“I feel like a lot of what students get out of it is they get a real view of what scientists are doing,” Burakowski said. “It’s so much more wonderful when you can have them get their hands on that. I don’t think I got to do that much when I was a kid in high school.”