You may remember Environmental Science and Policy student, Janelle Sylvester ’14 from when we announced that she won the prestigious TROPIMUNDO Scholarship in 2014 out of over 1,000 applicants and 300 eligible submissions. Or maybe it was when her research paper, “Impact of White-Tailed Deer Browsing on Plant Species Composition in the Central Texas Hill Country Preserves,” won the best undergraduate paper award for the 19th Annual International Interdisciplinary Conference on the Environment. Well, since graduating from St. Edward’s in 2014, where she served as president of Students for Sustainability for two years and was awarded a $1,500 scholarship from the National Recycling Coalition (NRC), Janelle has been keeping busy!
As part of the TROPIMUNDO award, Janelle was sent to Brussels, Belgium to begin her MS program in Tropical Ecology at Université Libre de Bruxelles. TROPIMUNDO is a 2 year-long EC-funded Erasmus Mundus Masters Course in Tropical Biodiversity and Ecosystems. The program merges higher education institutes with experts in the fields of tropical rainforest, woodland, and coastal ecosystems. It’s notable that in her admission letter, the course director told her she was their first choice out of 300 applicants.
So far as part of this program, Janelle has studied not only in Brussels, but on the east coast of Peninsular Malaysia and has plans to spend her third semester in Florence, Italy.
Janelle is currently in Costa Rica at the Las Cruces Biological Station near the town of Agua Buena working on her Master’s thesis. For her thesis, she will be examining seed-to-seedling transitions in plots that have undergone three different restoration methods: natural regeneration, plantation planting, and island planting (where different sized nuclei of trees are planted rather than planting the entire area). She will be using long-term databases on seed rain and seedling recruitment collected at Las Cruces to do so. Click here to read her full thesis proposal.
Later this summer, Janelle will be taking a backpacking vacation across the southern part of Africa, beginning in South Africa and ending in Zanzibar. Way to go, Janelle!