![](http://cas.loyno.edu/sites/cas.loyno.edu/files/styles/body_featured_image/public/achievements/Sydney%20Young%20pic%20crop.jpg?itok=dzVHPNzE)
Sydney Young, ENVA ’17, just finished two months of field work with a Syracuse University PhD student studying plant island biogeography at Clarks Hill Lake just north of Augusta, Georgia. Every day they went to locations on different islands to measure tree diameter, estimate shrub cover for the plots, and take soil samples. They also collected tea bags to measure decomposition rates and took photos of the canopy. She learned the statistics program R while assisting with data analysis.