Many of 黑料社区鈥檚 numerous trails and open spaces are heavily used鈥嗏�斺�唚hich can lead to costly and time-consuming constant trail maintenance. UNC graduate student Ara Metz is hoping to help Boulder, 黑料社区, better maintain its trails and open spaces so people can continue to enjoy the outdoors.

Metz is working with UNC鈥檚 Sharon Bywater-Reyes, Ph.D., an assistant professor of Environmental Geoscience, and Chelsie Romulo, Ph.D., an assistant professor in the Department of Geography, GIS, and Sustainability, on a research project funded by a one-year, $10,000 City of Boulder grant.

The research focuses on the city鈥檚 extensive trails through the use of drones and ground data collection to better understand the level of erosion that鈥檚 occurring.

鈥淲e鈥檙e going to look at all of these different variables to enable the City of Boulder鈥檚 Open Space and Mountain Parks to plan their trails, if they need to do trail maintenance or just looking at the conditions of undesignated trails that people make on their own,鈥� Metz said.

NSF Grants $1 Million to Develop Assessment Tool

The National Science Foundation awarded two UNC faculty members a $1.077 million grant to improve teaching in college-level environmental science courses.

To help instructors make evidence-based decisions on how to test their students鈥� understanding of complex concepts, Assistant Professor Chelsie Romulo and Professor Steven Anderson are developing a program that will assess students鈥� understanding of connections among food-energy-water concepts.

鈥淚n all of education, our main objective is for students to learn, and there are lots of different ways to teach so students can learn, as well as tests to see if learning is happening 鈥� that鈥檚 the piece that鈥檚 difficult,鈥� Romulo said. 鈥淚n order to assess, we need tools for assessment; we need to test instructors and students together to see if what the instructor is doing is effective.鈥� 

Student Receives $5,000 Fellowship

Gabriela Masztalerz, a junior Honors student majoring in Speech-Language Pathology, received the National Collegiate Honors Council鈥檚 $5,000 2020 Portz Fellowship for her research project, 鈥淎ccent Modification and Identity: A Phenomenological Study Exploring the Experiences of International Students and Immigrants/Refugees.鈥�

Her project focuses on individuals who, after experiencing accent discrimination, seek services to help shape their accents to sound similar to the standard accent of a region.

鈥淲hile accent modification has been shown to positively affect the lives of its clients, many people believe it is also a forceful attempt at Western globalization that simultaneously diminishes cultural integrity,鈥� she said. 鈥淚 wanted to explore this topic because I believe it is important for future speech-language pathologists and the general population to know how this therapy affects the personal, social and professional identities of different individuals, specifically international students, immigrants and refugees.鈥�