Institute at Brown for Environment and Society

Feng will explore how soil nitrogen availability varies across secondary tropical forest regrowth in the Atlantic forests of Brazil. This summer, she will travel to the state of Bahia, Brazil to collect soil samples from pre-determined forested sites, each in a different stage of regrowth. She will then analyze the nitrogen content of the soil using a process called spectrophotometry. Her work, in combination with that of others in the Porder lab, will help to advance scientists’ current understanding of how nitrogen is cycled through ecosystems over the course of secondary tropical forest regrowth.