Graduate students uncover stories hidden in the forests of the past
Armed with maps and 19th century handwriting, students are building a picture of elm before disease and development reshaped the landscape.
(From left) Emma Busteed, a graduate student in Carolyn Copenheaver's Advanced Forest Ecology class, looks at a tree with Alex Dyer nearby. Photo by Luke Hayes for Virginia Tech.
When Emma Busteed signed up for Advanced Forest Ecology, she didn’t expect her research skills to hinge on deciphering 19th century cursive.
“I never knew all those hours practicing cursive with my grandma would come in handy,” she said. “Now I’m reading thousands of pages of digital scans of century-old land survey notes and turning it into data.”
Taught by Professor Carolyn Copenheaver and Assistant Professor Carrie Fearer, both of the Department of Forest Resources and Environmental Conservation, the small class invites students to learn ecology through experience rather than just reading studies.
Each semester, students design and carry out a research project aimed at generating publishable results.
“This isn’t a class where you just talk about methods,” Copenheaver said. “You do the work, you ask questions, analyze real data, and contribute something new to our understanding of forests.”
Reconstructing Indiana’s elm forests
This year’s project takes students far from the field but deep into forest history. The class is reconstructing what Indiana’s forests looked like before Dutch elm disease reshaped the landscape in the early 1900s.
Using handwritten survey records from the 1800s, students are cataloging “witness trees,” the landmark trees surveyors used to map the land. Those notes, stored in the National Archives in Washington, D.C., capture a snapshot of the forest before widespread European settlement and before disease decimated one of its most iconic species.
“Instead of going out into a forest, we’re going out into a historical one,” Copenheaver said. “We’re seeing the woods through someone else’s eyes, and that’s incredibly valuable.”
Will Parrott explains some of his findings in class. Photo by Luke Hayes for Virginia Tech.
To make sense of those old notes, students translate measurements, map coordinates, and species names into modern datasets. Then they analyze where and how elm trees grew compared with their neighbors.
Will Parrott, a master’s degree student, described that process as a blend of detective work and data science.
“We’re using statistical models to understand how elms were positioned in the landscape, particularly if they tended to grow near other species or close together,” he said. “It’s cool to think these tiny details can tell us something about what the forest looked like more than a hundred years ago.”
Real research, real collaboration
Unlike many graduate courses, Advanced Forest Ecology operates like a research lab. Students divide responsibilities from data collection to GIS mapping and meet regularly to refine their methods and share results.
“We’ve all found our niche,” Busteed said. “Alex [Dyer] is great with GIS, Will handles the spreadsheets, and I’m the speed reader for all this old handwriting. Our class is a real research team.”
That collaborative energy drives the course. Copenheaver and Fearer guide the group’s scientific approach but give students ownership of the work, including the goal of submitting their findings for publication by semester’s end.
“Their project bridges forest health and ecology,” said Fearer, who studies tree pathogens and disease resilience. “By reconstructing how the American elm — Ulmus americana — functioned in the forest before Dutch elm disease, we can better understand how ecosystems respond to disturbance and how they might adapt to future challenges.”
Building scientists by doing
For the students, the project has been both challenging and empowering.
“It’s a lot of problem-solving,” Busteed said. “Historical data is messy. But learning how to deal with that and still pull meaningful results from it has made me more confident as a researcher.”
Parrott agreed.
“This course is a practice run at being a scientist,” he said. “You do everything from writing to analysis and collaboration in a space where it’s OK to make mistakes and figure things out.”
Dyer, a master’s degree student in geography, said the experience has been immediately useful.
“Watching how we plan a paper together has helped me organize my own writing,” he said. “It’s been a hands-on way to see how good research actually gets done.”
Lasting learning
As the semester draws to a close, students' excitement is as tangible as their data maps. Their work will be ready to submit for publication at the course’s completion.
“When students realize they’re capable of creating new knowledge, that’s the moment they see themselves as scientists,” Copenheaver said.
For Busteed, the takeaway is simple.
“It’s one thing to learn about forest ecology,” she said. “It’s another to actually add to it.”
