Introduction Page 7A |
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Just downhill from the Pierce Laboratory is the Barn, home of all trucks, the tractor, about 8 snowmobiles, a wood shop, and plenty of storage and work space. The annual barn dance (during the Cooperators Meeting) takes place in the Barn, too. Behind the barn (shown below in greater detail) is the sample archive. The archive building was constructed in 1990 to permanently store samples of soil, water, plant tissue, and other materials. When scientists do research in the forest, they usually collect extra sample. For example, a scientists might only need 500 mL of water from a stream for a certain laboratory measurement, but he or she might collect a full liter. The extra is useful in case some of the sample spills, or in case the scientist decides to look at something else in the water. Sometimes when the scientist is finished - and if nothing has spilled - there may be extra sample left over. This is true for water, soil, vegetation and many other types of samples. When this happens, scientists may decided to permanently store, or "archive" their samples. Many years in the future, different scientists may be interested in new types of research, or equipped with better technology, and may take small "subsamples" from these archived samples.
For example, scientists have been collecting precipitation samples at the HBEF for several decades, and have stored extra samples in the archive building. If, sometime in the future, a scientist is interested in measuring the amount of lead in rainfall over the past 30 years, this scientist can take small subsamples from the precipitation archives and analyze these samples for lead content. Because the archive lets scientists look into the past in this way, it is almost like a time machine!
While the Forest Service maintains all the facilities in the the HBEF, the Hubbard Brook Research Foundation maintains the nearby Pleasant View Farm Complex (PVFC), a dormitory facility and additional lab space for students, technicians, and scientists. The PVFC is about one mile from the Forest Service buildings. In 1983, Cornell and Yale Universities purchased Pleasant View Farm and renovated the 200 year-old building into a dormitory building that can house 14 people. In addition, a 2-bay garage and a laboratory were constructed next to the renovated farmhouse to provide extra research space. The laboratory is named after the previous owner of Pleasant View, Henrietta Kendall Towers, who provided a place to stay and showed great kindness to early HBES scientists.
Living at Pleasant View and working in the Towers Laboratory can be exciting and scientifically interesting. For example, the summer residents of PVF host weekly potlucks and "science nights" for the entire HBEF community. The potlucks give scientists a chance to get to know one another and informally discuss their research and interesting ecological ideas; and it gives everyone a chance to play some great beach volleyball (PVF has a sand court). One scientist or student informally presents his or her research results at the weekly science nights, giving everyone else a chance to ask questions and learn about different types of research. Are you interested in ecological questions? What sort of questions most interest you? To learn more about some of the questions being answered at the HBEF, proceed to the next page. |
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