Three UNC undergraduates conduct research at N.C. field sites with inaugural summer research assistantships
January 9, 2025
Earlier this fall, three University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill undergraduates participated in a virtual seminar where they presented lighting talks on the research they each conducted over the summer as the inaugural recipients of the UNC Institute for the Environment’s Summer Research Assistantship Awards.
Leah Morrissey ’25, Emma Lovelace’25 and Kenza Hessini ’25 each spent the summer at a North Carolina field site where they previously completed a semester. The semester-long immersive experience provides students the opportunity to explore real environmental issues through a combination of coursework, field trips, group research projects and internships with local organizations. With the help of these new awards, students got the chance to go back to the field site for the summer to continue their research.
“This is a merit-based award, so it is competitive for any student that has attended one of the three domestic field sites that is away from Chapel Hill,” said Susan Cohen, associate director of the UNC Institute for the Environment, during her opening remarks of the seminar. “This is a fantastic opportunity and we are really excited.”
The awards are made possible by the generosity of the Timothy Pate and Jessica Hope Pate Environmental Field Site Awards and Scurry Environmental Field Site Awards.
Echoes of conservation
Leah Morrisey spent the summer at the Highlands Field Site working on part of a long-term wetland monitoring project. Throughout the summer, she conducted water quality data collection, dragonfly and damselfly surveys, acoustic monitoring of birds, bats and frogs and identifying animals in the wetlands and surrounding areas using trail cams.
The focus of Morrisey’s experience, though, was on the acoustic monitoring of bats. Of the 17 species of bats in North Carolina, 13 are found in Highlands. Four are federally threatened or endangered and many others are under review for protection, Morrisey explained. In some parts of the state, there has been a devastating population decline of up to 98%.
“Bats are negatively impacted by multiple factors such as diseases, like the white-nose syndrome, which is why it is so important for us to monitor them for conservation purposes, to check in on their numbers, how their population is doing,” Morrisey said in her presentation.
Morrissey used acoustic monitoring because bats make noises using echolocation to navigate and find food. Special monitors installed on trees in the wetlands were used to capture those sounds. Each species has a different set calls, which is how she was able to differentiate the calls in the data she collect. Over the course of her project, Morrisey studied six wetlands and collected a half-million sound files.
She was thrilled to find that all 13 bat species were recorded at one of her wetland study sites.
“These results really show us that for more than half of the recorded bat species, Bartram was the wetland that they were recorded at the most and this is especially exciting because this is one of our mitigation wetlands that was restored pretty recently,” she said. “The fact that we are getting more activity across multiple bat species in a restored wetland, it just speaks to the importance of wetlands, how they provide wildlife habitat, especially for endangered species and they really do promote biodiversity.”
She also found that bat activity was correlated with distance of the wetland to the road—when a wetland is close to a road, there is less activity. Her data showed activity was up to five times greater in secluded wetlands compared to ones closer to the road.
A world beneath the surface
Emma Lovelace trekked back to the Morehead City Field Site to study a testate amoeba. More specifically, her study focused on Paulinella ovalis, an understudied yet most abundant microorganism in the salty, warm ecosystem in Morehead City. These tiny organisms likely play an important role in the microbial food web.
Lovelace collected samples from two sites along the Neuse River and ran multiple experiments to learn more about their abundance and life cycle.
The first objective was to determine how long their shells, also called tests, stuck around after the organism died. She then estimated the percentage of living cells found in a given sample. These two values were important to understanding the amoeba’s true abundance.
“We have to know the percentage of viable cells first before we are able to estimate its grazing pressure and the kind of effect it is having on its prey,” Lovelace explained.
Next, she sourced live samples to look at under a microscope to count the assumed living and assumed dead amoebas.
“This was really exciting for me and my mentor Nathan to see because we never looked at live samples of Paulinella until this summer. So, this was really fun,” she said, showing a video of the presumed living sample and how it moved on the microscope slide.
Once she had an idea of how many Paulinella tests contained live and active cells, she next attempted to measure its feeding rates on picocyanobacteria. Her first attempt failed due to the preservative in the sample being toxic.
Lovelace pivoted the research to find a preservative that was conducive to the experiment. She ran several tests on different preservatives and found that Lugol’s iodine was the best for maintaining Paulinella ovalis abundance post sample collection.
“These measurements are important because previous measurements of potential grazing pressure were based off of test abundances rather than the actual live cells,” she said. “So knowing how long these tests persist and the fraction of live versus empty tests is important for understanding the grazing pressure they exert on picocyanobacteria.”
Mapping perceptions of the Currituck Sound
Kenza Hessini spent the summer in the Outer Banks analyzing mental models of the Currituck Sound Coalition. Through interviews with members of the coalition, she used a qualitative study method called fuzzy cognitive mapping to show how the coalition perceives the sound, its current state and how it is changing.
“My work was more social science oriented,” she explained. “I was looking at perceptions of the Currituck Sound, more specifically analyzing mental models of the Currituck Sound Coalition.”
The Currituck sound is a body of water at the Northern end of the Outer Banks and extends into part of Virginia. It is unique because its nearest connection to the ocean is 50 miles south at the Oregon Inlet. Due to its location, it has a low salt concentration and supports a unique animal and plant species ecosystem.
Because the Currituck Sound is so unique, the Currituck Sound Coalition was formed by Audubon in 2019 to understand and plan for the conservation and restoration of the sound. The coalition brings together stakeholders from non-profits, government agencies, town and county governments and universities.
Hessini interviewed 11 stakeholders from the coalition and created the mental maps. During the interviews, Hessini asked the participant to think about the variables that make up the sound and they created a list and connected them with causal arrows showing how the variables are linked.
She aggregated the maps and standardized the vocabulary to create one big map to represent the coalition.
The variables were grouped into categories of “driver,” or drivers of change; “receiver,” variables that are influenced by other things but don’t influence other variables; and “ordinary,” variables that influence and can be influenced.
“This is important to know within the Currituck Sound because it shows which variables the Currituck Sound Coalition views as being the most influential,” she said.
She also looked at complexity score, which is the number of receiver variables divided by the number of driver variables in the system and can demonstrate how complex a system is.
“Overall we saw low complexity scores,” she said. “What this means for the system is that the system is influenced by a lot of different factors and there are a lot of different things happening within the system, which means a lot of interventions would be needed in the system. Which makes sense to me in terms of the Currituck Sound because it is such a big system. There’s so much going on, there’s so many different variables, that in order to influence change in the system there’s going to need to be a lot of different interventions being put in place.”
The Institute for the Environment, in partnership with the Environment, Ecology and Energy Program and the UNC Study Abroad Office, offers semester-long experiential education in ecosystem settings ranging from mountains to coast to urban environments. Learn more on our Field Sites page on our website.
To learn more about the assistantship and how to apply, visit the Internships + Awards page on our website.
See more photos from the internships in this slideshow.
