Ohio Northern University Environmental & Field Biology

Ohio Northern University Environmental & Field Biology The Environmental and Field Biology major at ONU is a unique, hands-on major that allows students to pursue careers in ecology and environmental science.

Hey it’s Camden and I’m back for week four! This week I learned about drinking water processing and what happens to resi...
06/23/2026

Hey it’s Camden and I’m back for week four! This week I learned about drinking water processing and what happens to residual treatment chemicals! Don’t worry, I was just dealing with lime residuals from a local quarry! I collected samples to test for Total solids/ total suspended solids and specific gravity. To finish the week off, I got to help write a phase 1 ESA for the project in Washington D.C.


Week 4:It’s Riley again after another week in nature. This week we tackled a few different issues around the parks. With...
06/23/2026

Week 4:

It’s Riley again after another week in nature. This week we tackled a few different issues around the parks. With chances of rain and high winds most of the week, we were only able to spray herbicide one day this week. On that day we sprayed several gallons of herbicide on Lespedeza in the prairies at one of the parks using backpack sprayers. Lespedeza is unable to be pulled due to their deep and intricate root system and the respond positively to prescribed burns. Additionally, their seed bank can last up to 20 years in the soil so it is a multi year process to manage it.

At the same park we ripped honeysuckle out of last week, we attacked a wall of Rubus this week. After the rubus was cut, we chipped it back into the woods so it could decompose there. Additionally we did some maintenance on the wood chipper afterwards as the Rubus stems can get wrapped around the drum.

The rest of the week was spent dealing with autumn olive and multiflora rose which was running amok in one of the prairies. This was done by cut and treat process where once the plant was cut it was treated with an herbicide mixture to prevent it from resprouting.


Week 4:Hello everyone! My name is Jacey, and this week at The Mammoth Site, I was at our micropicking station! I spent m...
06/21/2026

Week 4:
Hello everyone! My name is Jacey, and this week at The Mammoth Site, I was at our micropicking station! I spent my week sifting through bags of sediment from Parker's Pit, which is the same off-site research project location the frog bones from last week came from. I was looking for any microfossils (any bones, bone fragments, and snail shells) that were in the sediment. Right now, all of the bones and shells I removed from the sediment were placed into vials labeled Miscellaneous, Jaws with Teeth, and Snails; but they will eventually be sorted out by type of bone and by species once those vials move down into Collections. Micropicking is important because it helps researchers understand the environment that used to exist in a certain area because all of these animals were the "locals" in the sense that they would have stayed within the Black Hills region and not travel too far away from it. These animals also represent the rest of the ecosystem, whereas the mammoths that The Mammoth Site are known for only represent one aspect of it. Although we're currently working on the sediment from Parker's Pit, we do the same thing with the sediment that we remove from our bonebed here at The Mammoth Site. The process of micropicking starts with screenwashing. This is where the sediment is washed through a screen that gets progressively smaller. This helps to sort out the sediment by size and clean off any loose material. Once the sediment has been screenwashed, it gets sent up to the micropicking station, and we go through those bags of sediment one small spoonful at a time. The microfossils that I was pulling were pretty easy to spot, but they can get even smaller than that! Sometimes, microfossils have to be plucked out of sediment with a single bristle from a paint brush! Stay tuned for next week because I'll be in the Prep Lab!


Hello again! This is Emma and I am officially halfway through my first 9 day hitch! I met my fellow ACC crew members ear...
06/21/2026

Hello again! This is Emma and I am officially halfway through my first 9 day hitch! I met my fellow ACC crew members early Monday morning for rig-up, and then we traveled all day to our worksite. My crew is assigned to complete trail maintenance on the Baileys Trail System in Wayne National Forest, the longest set of mountain biking trails east of the Mississippi!

We spent much of the past 4 days clearing brush, removing duff, installing drains, leveling tread, and defining the hinge and back slope. My favorite part is defining the hinge and back slope because it’s super important for reducing future soil erosion and extending the life of the trail (see pictures).

I was also fortunate to spend the weekend between training and our first hitch at Shenandoah National Park! I even hiked a section of the Appalachian Trail, which has been a bucket list item of mine for a while!


Hey, it’s Taylor again! My fifth week I was able to finish the first page of the CTAB protocol (including incubation and...
06/20/2026

Hey, it’s Taylor again! My fifth week I was able to finish the first page of the CTAB protocol (including incubation and vortexing with the user’s choice of modules!) and begin both the Qiagen and Zymo mini kits. By Tuesday, it was a lot of brainstorming, research, and troubleshooting. Preparation for next week, where we’ll be working on our greatest challenge of the project— how to handle the separation of aqueous phases in a way that’s easily customizable for users despite the inherent variability of the products! Unfortunately, this means that I don’t have a lot to show for it, or at least nothing terribly interesting. Instead, I offer you: A very small sample of the red-inked, stream-of-consciousness chaos that is my lab notebook, evidence of the few procedures I’m working through right now, some more detailed photos of the Opentrons Flex robot, and, finally a double rainbow! A much-needed good omen going into my work next week 🙂


Week 5:Hey everyone! This week we collected samples from our agricultural sites, and I got to work on my bird extraction...
06/20/2026

Week 5:

Hey everyone! This week we collected samples from our agricultural sites, and I got to work on my bird extraction from the mist nets*. I worked mainly with extracting House Sparrows (Passer domesticus), but I also included a fun picture of me releasing a Common Yellowthroat (Geothlypis trichas)! I will begin helping to process birds in the coming weeks! It was also a large lab week for me. Batch 1 (the samples we cultured last week) showed no Salmonella growth. However, this week we ran Batches 2 and 3, and we have some Salmonella growth (the black colonies on the red agar)! We are going to run qPCR to confirm that these cultures are, in fact, Salmonella in the coming weeks as well. We also began work on antimicrobial resistance testing using the disk diffusion method. In order to do this, I created a lawn of E. coli on a Mueller-Hinton agar plate with the sample at a 0.5 concentration (determined using a McFarland standard). Then, the plate is sectioned into 4 roughly equal parts, and a disk of medication is centered in each section. The zone of inhibition (the diameter of the ring of no bacterial growth around the medication) is measured to determine if the bacteria is resistant or susceptible to the bacteria. So far, all our samples have tested susceptible to our four antibiotics (Ceftriaxone, Ciprofloxacin, Sulfamethoxazole-trimethoprim, and Tetracycline). Next week, I will be testing Batches 4 and 5 for Salmonella, so stay tuned!

*All birds captured and handled under federal research permits


Week 5Lilly here! This week working with the Geauga Park District I began the process of going through Hester-Dendy Trap...
06/19/2026

Week 5
Lilly here! This week working with the Geauga Park District I began the process of going through Hester-Dendy Traps. These traps were collected when I worked here last summer but now the time has arrived to sit in front of a microscope and begin the process of picking out our Macroinvertebrates. The traps were located in a cold water stream with hopes of being a viable habitat for the species Brook Trout. Going through these samples will help the park determine if food sources for Brook Trout are present but also to make sure we have good indicator species living in the stream. This week also included Geauga Park District’s company picnic. It was very fun to be able to have all the park departments together and to hear about everyone’s projects for the summer! To end the week we performed treatment on our Hemlock trees to combat Hemlock Woolly Adelgid, an invasive insect which feeds on sap from hemlock needles, killing the needles, shoots and branches.


Week 4: Hi everyone! This is Emily, and here’s what another week of work looked like as the Blue Heron Reserve Intern! o...
06/19/2026

Week 4: Hi everyone! This is Emily, and here’s what another week of work looked like as the Blue Heron Reserve Intern! on Monday, I headed out to the reserve with the Seasonal Naturalist, Maggie (aka the goat of Blue Heron🐐), and while I mowed the fen path with the brush hog, Maggie checked out some snakes and insects along the trail. We set some macroinvertebrate traps in the cold seep, and on Tuesday, we made our Great Return; but before that, a quick lesson on tractor-driving was mandatory. During our Great Return, Maggie and I demolished some Phragmites via saw and shovel, and we also collected the macroinvertebrates from the traps we set. On Wednesday, Debbie, Maggie, and I did a bat program in a Fremont City Park in the morning; it had a pretty great attendance of around 40 kids! The rest of the day was spent sorting macroinvertebrates. At the end of the week on Thursday, Maggie and I went with some kids from Nature Camp to go kayaking and hiking at Magee Marsh with some folks from H2Ohio!


Today was the day! We released the Eastern Box Turtles into their acclimation cage (aka the ONU turtle fortress) as part...
06/19/2026

Today was the day! We released the Eastern Box Turtles into their acclimation cage (aka the ONU turtle fortress) as part of the Repatriating Ohio BOx TurtleS program in collaboration with The Ohio Division of Wildlife.

The ENFB Turtle team came together to tag the Eastern Box Turtles for our radio-tracking program at ONU. Nice job! Stay ...
06/18/2026

The ENFB Turtle team came together to tag the Eastern Box Turtles for our radio-tracking program at ONU. Nice job! Stay tuned for updates on the release and monitoring program!


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