he could be at the beach, but instead, Shannon LaDeau '97 is knee-deep in a swamp ... and she likes it! Well, she could do without the mosquitoes and poison ivy, but she enjoys her National Science Foundation-supported summer job doing independent research.

Shannon's swamp, the Hawkins Conservation Area about a mile from campus, is dominated by thick tufts of vegetation called tussock sedges. She's taking soil samples on and between these tussocks and analyzing what kinds of seeds lie at different soil depths. "From this, you can tell what plants lived there in the past, and you can predict what the area might look like over time," she explains. In searching scholarly journals, LaDeau discovered that this kind of "seed bank analysis" hasn't been comprehensively dealt with in a tussock wetland since 1936. To create a topographical vegetation map, she's also recording which plants grow where in the swamp.

LaDeau separates her soil samples into 800 tiny sections, each of which she tends in Clapp Laboratory's greenhouse. After several weeks, she counts the number and type of plants in each section germinating from the formerly dormant seeds. "I take care of my samples, but the greenhouse staff got me all the equipment I needed and shared their library," LaDeau says.

Come fall, she'll expand the summer work into a senior thesis. LaDeau plans to germinate more swamp plants from seeds and grow them in the greenhouse under various light and moisture conditions. "I want to keep finding out new things," LaDeau says. "I've done labs [for classes] that were very well set up, but this is the first thing I've been in charge of and have had to think through and make work. All my seedlings could die tomorrow and I'd have to start over, but I like that sort of challenge. I intend to go to graduate school at some point, and research experience is critical." Her mosquito bites, however, probably won't help with grad school. -- Emily Harrison Weir