Senior Conservation Biology major Olivia Bernier recently presented work from her senior thesis at the Northeast Natural History Conference in Albany, New York

Olivia Bernier delivered a poster titled “Determinants of Forest Health in St. Lawrence County, New York”. In the poster, Bernier presented a subset of the results of her senior project in which she is investigating forest health in five state forests near Canton. During summer 2022, funded by an NSF-grant to St. Lawrence University, Bernier inventoried 15 forest plots and measured canopy cover, understory vegetation, tree diversity and abundance, and seedling and sapling regeneration. She also cored a subset of trees for dendrochronological analysis. During her senior year, Bernier has been combining those data with data collected by students in the SLU Forest Ecology classes in 2017 and 2021 to see if she develop statistical models of forest health. Bernier is also completing a minor in Statistics at St. Lawrence University.