Seeing the Forest Through the Trees

Students use tree plots to understand ecological succession.

In his first year of teaching at KUA in 2010, Blaine Kopp staked out a 10-by-10 meter plot perched high on the Potato Patch. Each year since, he has climbed this campus hill adjacent to the lower playing fields to section off another plot of ground. In various plots, white pine, aspen, and birch trees of various sizes and ages shoot from the ground. The Louis Munro Chair of Environmental Science is repeatedly asked the same question about his plots: Who planted the trees? And therein lies the point of his work. No one planted the trees.

Students in Kopp’s AP environmental science classes use these spaces to study ecological succession—the idea that when new resources, habitats, and space become available, early colonizers come in and oc cupy the landscape. The plots demonstrate secondary succession, which occurs as nature reclaims land that was once altered by humans. In one visit to the succession plots, students are able to evaluate the types of changes in land across one, two, or more years. The first few years show subtle differences, but changes in canopy height are easy to spot between the oldest and youngest plots.

Students design a sampling strategy that will allow them to test a hypothesis.

“We go out and learn the basic five types of vegetation, then we’ll go back and start to generate some hypotheses about the types of change that they think they’re seeing,” says Kopp. “Students design a sampling strategy that will allow them to test a hypothesis, so they need to measure data, then write with confidence and statistical significance whether what they predicted was supported by that data.”

In addition to applying science, stu dents develop a new relationship with The Hilltop, recognizing more scientific details about the landscape in which they live and speaking with a broadened understanding of ecological succession as a result.