Institute at Brown for Environment and Society

Emmaline Suchland ’16 is a Biology concentrator interested in the effects of climate change on species’ survival, distributions, and risks of extinction, especially in a tropical setting. She is working with Brown PhD student Emily Hollenbeck in collaboration with Professor Dov Sax (Ecology and Evolutionary Biology) to study the influence of climate on several species of epiphytes (plants that live on other plants). This summer she is working in the tropical montane cloud forest of Monteverde, Costa Rica, as well as travelling to several other sites around Costa Rica and Panama. Her project involves climbing trees to survey epiphyte populations in the canopy, measuring physiological traits relating to water-stress tolerance in the lab, analyzing climate data, and collecting records of elevational and geographic ranges using herbarium specimens. Through elucidating how climate affects the distributions and survival of these plants, she hopes to help inform efforts of their conservation. Emma is from Seattle, Washington and is a captain of the track and field team at Brown.