Perri Silverhart, MS Student Geosciences, and Caitlin Hodges, PhD Student Soil Science, begin the field component of their research at Cole Farm.  Silverhart, a member of the 2016 CZO REU cohort, returns to Penn State and the SSHCZO to understand anthropogenic influences on valley sedimentation and inputs to fluvial systems.  Hodges joins our team following the completion of a Master’s degree at the University of Georgia and plans to identify the biogeochemical variation of the farm soils.  The pair will collect more than fifty soil cores across three transects to help answer the reseach questions of:  what is the depth to bedrock in an agricultural environment and what are the variations in subsurface respiration as a function of depth and landscape position in an agricultural environment?