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WKU Geoscience Students Study Natural Resource Management In Alaska's Tongass National Forest
Bowling Green, Ky. - A group of seven Western Kentucky University graduate and undergraduate students, led by Geography Professor Chris Groves and U.S. Forest Service Geologist Jim Baichtal, traveled to Southeast Alaska’s Tongass National Forest for a weeklong short course this summer.
The group flew to Ketchikan, and from there traveled by floatplane to Prince of Wales Island, the site of the course. Tongass National Forest, the country’s largest with an area of 17 million acres, lies primarily on remote islands off the western coast of Canada’s British Columbia and contains the planet’s largest remaining expanse of uncut coastal rain forest. The area also contains very significant cave and karst resources, including caves with archeological and fossil remains that offer key support for a theorized coastal migration route taken by ancient humans making their way from Asia into North America. While the "glue" that bound the course together was the focus on various aspects of karst hydrology and geomorphology of the area, these are closely related to numerous aspects of resource management issues that challenge Forest Service land managers. One issue the class studied, for example, is how very acidic water draining from peat bogs in the island’s mountain areas interacts with limestone bedrock in the karst areas, with the resulting geochemical processes having significant impact on the productivity of salmon spawning rivers draining from the large karst springs at the base of the mountains. This class continued a growing, five-year collaboration between WKU and U.S. Forest Service scientists in Alaska. Two Hoffman Institute graduate students are working on thesis research projects in Tongass National Forest, following Bill Curry who completed his research on cave sedimentation rates there in 2002. The students, Johanna Kovarik and Melissa Hendrickson, are studying the relationships between logging practices and resulting impacts on groundwater hydrology and geochemistry. "In my mind, these types of interactions are at the heart of the mission of WKU's Applied Research and Technology Program," said Dr. Groves, director of the Hoffman Environmental Research Institute within the ARTP. "They provide great experiences that increase the technical fluency of our students, while proving a real service to federal land managers through research that helps them better understand the resources they are charged with protecting." Dr. David Keeling, Geography and Geology Department Head, added that "this summer experience is an excellent example of how programs beyond the traditional classroom can enhance the learning process and provide students with a real link between the theoretical and the practical."
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