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Undergraduate Students

Siddhartha Dhakal is a senior undergraduate from Nepal, a small mountainous country located in Southeast Asia. Climate change has posed a serious threat in Nepal as well, with increased rate at which Himalayan glaciers are melting. Since anthropomorphic carbon dioxide is one the major factors driving climate change, I have been interested in looking at patterns of CO2 cycle in the atmosphere. I am charactering carbon flux and sequestration potential of Bottomland Hardwood Forest (BHF) at Northeastern Louisiana using data generated from US-ULM flux tower. To date, the amount of CO2 sequestered by BHF is largely unknown. Further, BHF are deciduous and potentially go from being a sink to a source depending on the season. Also, the net carbon exchange in such forest systems vary on an annual basis. Thus, one of our main goal is to determine when and for how long BHFs function as net sink or source of carbon. This will also allow us to quantify carbon fluxes on a temporal scale - from daily balances to yearly ecosystem level exchanges.

Aside from Plant Ecology Lab, I am also working with Dr. Garlapati at ULM, where we are trying to elucidate the role Giardia initiation factor 4A in Giardia lamblia. Outside my research and classes, I like listening to Nepali, Hindi and American music and enjoy playing classical Indian/Nepali instruments like tabla, dholak and madal. Also, I enjoy hiking and playing ping-pong, volleyball, soccer, and cricket.

Melissa Bloch is a biology major from Hot Springs, Arkansas. She joined the Plant Ecology Lab in Spring of 2015, with an interest in examining the spectral properties of plants. Her interest in this area has been refined and intensified through my current research. She has been using novel technology to better understanding of different aspects of forest dynamics and have been examining its utility in forest management and conservation.

During the summer of 2016, she had the remarkable opportunity to travel to the Himalayas for an internship with Ashoka Trust for Research in Ecology and the Environment (ATREE). During the summer, she worked on ground-truthing to create accurate land-use/land-cover maps to assess the spatial and temporal changes in the Eastern Himalayas, a Biodiversity Hotspot. Melissa will be continuing the internship in summer of 2017 and will be focusing on the forest land cover. She will be using an unmanned aerial system (UAS) and a high resolution spectral camera to model the tree species distribution, diversity and abundance. With the spectral data collected, she plans to create a spectral library for multi-temporal observation of forest-climate interactions, such as shift in species range.

She plans to continue her research through her masters and PhD.

Research Interests:

Ecosystem Level Ecology Himalayan Ecosystem Land-Use and Land-Cover Mapping Biodiversity and Conservation Forest Canopy Spectral Dynamics Forest Phenology Global Change Ecology and Management

Current Project: Melissa is assessing the optical-phenological variability in the bottomland hardwood forest at Russell Sage WMA, the site of the Carbon Flux Tower. Using an unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV) and spectral cameras she has already mapped species distribution based on spectral profiles of delineated crowns. She is currently examining the seasonality of various spectral and biophysical indices. She is looking for connections between the representation of canopy spectral properties, weather conditions and carbon flux.