When will Sufjan do Ohio?

I was recently accepted at Ohio State University as a grad student in Entomology. In May I will be moving to Wooster to start my first field season as a researcher! My previous two summers I was an undergrad assistant, and never truly saw the results of my efforts in the field. One exception has been in the Grieshop lab; Matt gave me a lot of opportunity to run with the hops project this summer. He likes to assign task managers in his lab to handle smaller projects like that, and it makes me feel like I have more ownership over my job that way. He made me coauthor on the poster because I led most of the project, except for the major number crunching and the ESA poster. On 5 March he is letting Emily and I present posters at the Michigan Organic Food and Farmers Alliance conference here in EL as first authors! I will present the hops research and Emily will be making a poster for the greenhouse research she's been doing.

In Ohio I will be working with Mary Gardiner, an MSU alum, in her Agricultural Landscape Ecology lab. I call it the ALE lab, like the beer. My project will be working with pumpkin growers in Ohio and experimental floral resource strips. There is a well-founded idea that providing flowers and grasses in an agricultural setting will support a variety of insects that can regulate certain pests in a field, and also pollinate crops. This is particularly important for squash plants because their flowers are only open between daybreak and noon. However, not all flowers and grasses are cost-effective. We will be studying how different types of floral strips attract different beneficial insects, and compare that to the costs of planting them. Hopefully, farmers can use this information to make better decisions for managing their crops in a safe and pesticide-free way.

Keep up with us in Ohio at our lab blog.