Congratulations Catherine Ruhm (MS, Fall 2018)

Congratulations to Catherine Ruhm, who defended her MS thesis in Geology in mid-November.  Catherine took on a complicated and intensive project on the soils and hydrology of abandoned mine lands in Cuyahoga Valley National Park, collecting absolutely critical baseline data on the properties of five sites which had been mined and reclaimed. She compared them to nearby reference sites unaffected by mining. She then collected before-and-after data at one site, to see whether the Park’s deep ripping restoration technique changed soil bulk density and infiltration.  The work involved hundreds and hundreds of soil cores, dozens of hours with the Guelph permeameter and an untold number of ticks and other stinging and biting things.

Her thesis was titled “The Effects of Two Types of Reclamation on Abandoned Non-Coal Surface Mines in Cuyahoga Valley National Park, Ohio” and you can read it thanks to the OhioLink ETD. But she’s got so much more data and plans for even more analyses than are in her thesis, so there’s more work to be done. Thankfully, Catherine has decided to stick around for a PhD in Applied Geology, so we can look forward to her insights into more geomorphic problems in the Cuyahoga Valley over the next four years.

Catherine Ruhm shows off a crest stage gage at one of the sites slated for restoration in Cuyahoga Valley National Park.