Author Archives: Will Mooreston

Quad Redesign: Sense of Nature

Posted by Will Mooreston

The final project for Introduction to Planting Design was another redesign of the UW Quad, this time as a group project, incorporating one of a variety of “sense of…” categories. My group chose Sense of Nature, and created both a design board and a shoebox model. The overall experiential idea was to immerse the visitor in a variety of typical Pacific Northwest ecosystems in a small space. This translated into the shoebox as Nature breaking free of its concrete container.

Slight mounds were necessary to create patches of wet and dry, conducive to a wider variety of plant types, creating patches of different vegetation and canopy experiences for the visitor.

The uniform elevation of the outer path allows both easy access to and around the Quad for the student on the go, as well as a more casual stroll. The constructed oval is a treated wood boardwalk, with stilts, stairs and bridges as necessary to elevate it slightly above the ground level, preventing soil compaction and root damage. The open design also allows for more infiltration of stormwater. The northern corner (which appears NE in plan view) receives the most sun, making it more suited for prairie and wildflower installations. The opposite corner, in the south, is typically darker and moister throughout the year, so provides an opportunity for a moss garden similar to the Hall of Mosses in the Hoh Rainforest. A level, oval boardwalk around the space, allows 

The interior lacks definitive paths, leaving the visitor free to explore at their own pace. Tree spacing is dense enough to obscure hidden wonders, but wide enough to allow easy navigation.

 

 

Pirates of the Prairies: Nutrient Acquisition by a Hemiparasite

Posted by Will Mooreston

Working in Dr. Jon Bakker’s Terrestrial Restoration Ecology Lab, I was able to assist one of his doctoral students, Natalie Schmidt, in her study of Castilleja levisecta, or golden paintbrush, a native of the prairies of Washington, Oregon, and British Columbia. We applied heavy isotopes of Nitrogen and Carbon to the host plants, and tracked their movement into the paintbrush. I presented some preliminary findings at the 2015 UW Undergraduate Research Symposium. The abstract I submitted to the symposium and the slides I presented are below.

Castilleja levisecta (CALE) is a threatened, hemiparasitic angiosperm, endemic to Pacific Northwest prairie ecosystems. Like other parasitic plants, CALE forms haustoria: root structures that connect the xylems of the two plants together. CALE then uses this connection to steal nutrients from the host plant to assist its own growth, without killing the host. While it is known that CALE will form haustorial connections with a number of host species, the quantities and timing of specific nutrients taken from the host plants remains a mystery. How old does CALE have to be before optimum nutrient uptake occurs? How does the chemical profile of the host plant change CALE’s growth rate and chemical profile, and are there tertiary effects on pollinators and herbivores that use CALE as their food source or habitat? We cannot begin to answer these questions until we know the basics of nutrient transfer from host to CALE. In this pilot study, we have labeled host plants with heavy isotopes of nitrogen and carbon, to track the length of time it takes CALE to acquire those nutrients via the haustoria, and the amount of each nutrient acquired from the host. We planted over 70 pairs of CALE and Eriophyllum lanatum (ERLA), one of CALE’s known host species. The roots of each seedling were planted across each other, to encourage haustorial connections to form. After several weeks of growth in pairs, heavy isotopes were applied to ERLA with the expectation that they would be taken up by CALE. Both plants were later dried and ground up for analysis of heavy isotope content. Analysis of these data will give us a better understanding of the timing and quantity of host nutrient uptake by CALE. This information will be used to inform efforts to restore and conserve populations of this threatened species.

Rage Garden

Posted by Will Mooreston

This was a really fun project for an intro Planting Design class, in which we redesigned the planting scheme for the “quad” on the UW campus (where the famous cherry trees live). Each student chose an emotion, which we then needed to elicit as a response from visitors to the site. I chose “rage” as I thought it would be fun to come up with lots of evil ways to make people angry with plants.

ragegarden-ledger

Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Iquitos, Peru (final)

Posted by Will Mooreston

For the final project of a collaborative design class, I teamed up with a group that had designed a floating chicken coop for the midterm. For the final, we expanded on that concept and proposed a floating community center (one of the primary citizen requests), with floating farms to make use of compost from all that chicken poop. We also had hand washing stations that used collected rain water, which I proposed piping under the river as a way to culturally and literally warm it. There is a cultural aversion to drinking rainwater, as all bad things come from the sky, and all good things from the river. Piping the rain below the water, without letting the clean water actually contact the highly contaminated river, would be a way of acknowledging the cultural heritage of the large indigenous population, while also addressing a primary vector for disease.

 

1-Chicken BNB

 

2-Chicken BNB

Interdisciplinary Collaboration: Iquitos, Peru (midterm)

Posted by Will Mooreston

A team project looking into possibilities for power generation in a floating, informal settlement called Claverito, in Iquitos, Peru. The format of the class is Landscape Architects teamed up with students from other disciplines (like me, Environmental Science), to collaborate on solutions that improve the ecological and human health for this community. The below is what I worked on for the midterm, with the final over here.

The people currently use makeshift power cables patched into the municipal grid, combined with kerosene generators and kerosene lamps. It’s all very dangerous and polluting, so my team looked for alternatives. We initially looked into hydropower, but section of Amazon tributary they live on is fairly stagnant. Our solutions:

  1. Follow literoflight.org‘s example to provide interior lighting during the day.
  2. Use a GravityLight, which residents could possibly build themselves from scrap parts (except for low-wattage LED bulbs, which would need to be shipped in).
  3. PotatoLights for supplemental energy.

Cooked potatoes produce more electricity than raw, it turns out. I was able to get mine to produce enough to make a tiny red LED light up. Not enough to really do any good, but a neat proof of concept.

potato light lit

 

potato light complete

Team-member Russ made a functional GravityLight:

gravity light demo

 

And team-member Sharon made some lovely boards:

gravity light board 1

gravity light board 2layout midterm

Seattle Greenrail: modeling the effects of replacing impervious infrastructure with pollinator­-friendly green space

Posted by Will Mooreston

This was a mock research proposal created for a class in Landscape Ecology. I’m not a big fan of the monorail, and thought it might be neat to study replacing it with an elevated green space like High Line Park in New York. We’d just learned about the modeling program HexSim, so I proposed using it to model pollinator behavior in the Pollinator Pathway on Capital Hill, then applying those models to a greenified monorail, aka Greenrail. Below are my presentation slides, followed by the proposal paper.

Mooreston-ResearchProposal-Greenrail

Ecological Forestry in the Working Forests of King County, WA

Posted by Will Mooreston

I’ve had the privilege of attending several classes taught by Professor Jerry Franklin. One of those classes was a two-week long field trip in September, 2015, exploring various fire-maintained forest ecosystems in central and southern Oregon. During the trip we also learned all about Professor Franklin’s ecological forestry practices. Each student is required to write a term paper as a part of the class, on a topic of their choosing. I chose to examine how King County is managing its forests, to see how their practices stack up against Jerry’s recommendations.

Mooreston-research-paper-EF-in-KC