By Allison Strickland
U of L scientist wins fellowship award
By Allison Strickland
Christopher Tripler, a scientist at the University of Louisville, has earned one of twelve National Science Foundation Minority Postdoctoral Research Fellowship awards.
Tripler will receive $100,000 over a period of two years to put toward ecological research. He was given the award for his project, “Comparing Urban and Rural Forests: How City Environments May Be Used to Model Long-term Changes in Forests Under Predicted Global Climate Changes.”
“I feel honored,” Tripler said of the award. “It’s sort of a vindication of all the work up until now.”
Tripler began developing the project last year after a series of papers written by well-known scientists about the future of the world’s forests were published. Tripler did not concede to the predictions that the scientists made about how they thought forests would look in the future.
“I figured there must be some way to test them,” Tripler said.
The study is not a comparison of urban forests with rural forests. Instead, tree growth and death in each is to be measured and compared. The project will focus on conditions at Iroquois and Bernheim Forests to help predict how they might respond to the projected climate change.
A computer model of the information and recruitment of tree species will predict what forests will look like over the next 100, 500, and even 1,000 years.
Tripler is the project coordinator and lead researcher, along with Margaret Carreiro. The research is in conjunction with the U of L Biology department, Metro Parks, the Olmsted Parks system, and Bernheim Forest.
Tripler, originally from Meriden, Connecticut, became interested in ecology in 1987. He received his bachelor’s degree at the University of Connecticut in 1991 and his doctorate in forest ecology from Idaho State University last year. He has been working at U of L since summer 2001.
