Ruthann Richards, Cheng Lab (Class of 2019)

BS Candidate, Environmental Science, Skidmore College

Ruthann is a sophomore at Skidmore College, where she also double minors in Computer Science and Political Science. She is the president of the Environmental Action Club and treasurer of BenefAction, which is the community service club on campus. At Skidmore, she works to increase student creation and engagement when concerning sustainability initiatives on campus and in their own lives. She will be working with the Cheng Lab this summer to study soil samples from New York City and Beijing.

ePortfolio Posts

Private: Final Poster – Finding Trends of Methanogenesis in Scott’s Creek Marsh

This link will lead to my final poster for the BUEE program : https://drive.google.com/file/d/1juePA7LDQmunGPVYcL-TC0WWbSkDkXIT/view?usp=sharing

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Private: TidyData

Before we made our posters, we had to analyze the data. The following link will show how I did that.

https://drive.google.com/file/d/18gOPert6hhN7p4ObovGeBYCnc5OC-8VA/view?usp=sharing 

If you would like to see the R^2 and equations for my scatterplots on sheet “Analysis of pHandNH4”, please download the file.  The graphs of IRIS tube analysis were pre-made from Mark Gormley’s research.

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Private: Questions From the Creek – Presentation

BUEE Presentation

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Private: Project Proposal

As sea levels rise, coasts will continue to push inland. This could allow for the creation of more wetlands, specifically coastal salt marshes. Coastal salt marshes are wetlands by the coast that can be created from tidal and storm energies or along low energy rivers. This study will focus on the former. Although wetlands only cover 6% of the world, they store as much as 33% of the world’s soil organic carbon. Particularly, salt marshes sequester up to 87.2 teragrams of carbon per year. Carbon sequestration is so prevalent in these systems due to anoxic conditions within their saturated soils. This forces the microbial community to use alternative electron acceptors including nitrogen, manganese, iron, sulfur, and carbon. The electron acceptor that a microbe will use progresses through the list stated above based on the environment’s pH and the state of the possible electron acceptors. When microbes use nitrogen as an electron acceptor, the byproduct is dinitrogen gas and water. However, when a soil has progressed to create an environment where carbon is the best electron acceptor the byproduct is methane. Methanogenesis would be disastrous, as it would negate the benefit of the carbon sequestration of this environment. This study would explore if progression to using carbon as an electron acceptor is inevitable for these systems.

The experimental site for this study will be Scott’s Creek Marsh in Southern California. Data from this site will be mined from Mark Gormley’s detailed analysis of the site, which will otherwise be used for his PH.D dissertation. There will be multiple parameters used to ascertain whether coastal salt marshes will inevitably become methanogenic : Concentration of nitrogen in microbial biomass, graviometric water content, initial and post incubation soil NOlevels, NH4 levels, and Total Inorganic Nitrogen levels, IRIS readings, pH measurements, and salt concentration measurements.

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Private: Citi Training in Biomedical Responsible Conduct of Research Course 1

Over  a week, I completed the first course in Biomedical Responsible Conduct of Research from the Citi Program. It was a useful course in teaching me the do’s and don’ts of research. There is a link to my completion certificate and my completion report.

citiCompletionReport8174062 (certificate)

citiCompletionReport8174062 (1)(report)

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Private: Ruthann’s Individual Development Plan

Individual Development Plan2

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