Working Towards Proactive Sustainability with Jen Sabol
When Jen Sabol, MSUS ’22 started Chatham’s Masters of Sustainability program, she already had ten years of environmental consulting under her belt. Now, nearly finished with her masters degree, she is an award-winning researcher, having recently received first place in the Oral Presentation category at the Student Symposium on the Environment. In her current and ongoing professional work, Jen writes reports for a contaminated site that once developed uranium bombs in southern Ohio. Through that work, Jen found a path towards a more fulfilling career:
MSUS Student, Jen Sabol
“My current work with environmental remediation and cleanup, which is very prevalent in southwestern Pennsylvania, is a reactive approach. I don't believe that the environment ever gets cleaned up to what it was before the contamination occurred. Sustainability to me means being more proactive and helping to protect the land with natural resource management or trying to change laws and regulations to prevent these things from continuing to happen.”
She found her way to Chatham’s MSUS program after volunteering on the Eden Hall Food Bank Farm, an opportunity that allowed her to get acquainted with Chatham’s Eden Hall Campus and—per Jen—perhaps “had a subconscious effect on [her] decision.” Despite starting the program during COVID, she quickly bonded with her advisor and Assistant Professor of Water Resources, Dr. Ryan Utz. Utz recognized Jen’s ambition to become an ecologist and immediately immersed her in the research that would evolve into her thesis project. Jen also cites Dr. Utz’s Environmental Statistics course as a major factor in her growth as researcher: “[That’s where I learned] the program R. It's a free coding program that ecologists have developed over the years. It's how you manage data, run statistics, and graph and plot your results. I had not known how to code before. [Ryan] hammered it into us that this is a skill that we'll need. I see that now that I'm starting to apply to PhD programs.”
In her thesis research, Jen has been studying how well four native Pennsylvania plant species—spicebush, serviceberry, bladdernut, and pawpaw—would survive in the presence of deer over-browsing and invasive plant species. Over the course of five months, Jen and three undergraduate ecology technicians have measured the plants and observed their growth and survivorship while also measuring environmental factors like temperature and light. After two to three more years of ongoing data collection, Jen hopes to publish her findings. But that’s not to say her research isn’t already being recognized in the field.
At the 2021 Student Symposium on the Environment at Westminster College, Jen won the first place Oral Presentation for her talk on the aforementioned research. Presenting her own work while learning new findings from her peers proved a meaningful experience for Jen: “I've learned to have a lot more confidence in myself in this program. Presenting my research was another way to do that. I made sure I was well-prepared and had rehearsed ahead of time. I wasn't even nervous because I had been so immersed in what I was doing.”
Some visual highlights from Jen’s work, including the plants involved in her research and special guests to the trail cam.
And though Jen’s work as an ecologist is just getting started, she already has takeaways to share that might help inform the eco-enthusiastic among us:
“There was something Dr. Carson [a University of Pittsburgh Professor that Jen has collaborated with] showed us in our ecology class based on research he had done. He had fenced-in areas and non-fenced areas that he was studying. When you have a fenced-in area and deer are not allowed in, [the plot] will be thick with shrubs and smaller trees and much more bio-diverse. Whenever I'm hiking now I think, This is actually a degraded forest because of the deer over-browsing. The deer don't have any natural predators, except for people who hunt. Wolves and pumas are no longer here and that has contributed to why there are more deer.”
And the solution? “Plant species that are browse-tolerant and diverse. [Ideally you’d be planting] a diverse group of shrubs or trees that would grow in the presence of deer.” Good thing we’ve already got Jen on the case!
Special thanks to Jen for sharing her research with us. If you’re interested in Masters of Sustainability programs at Chatham, check them out here.