The project focuses on the efficiency of Vassar's heating system. Vassar students were surveyed about their experience with dorm heating and those responses were compared with the temperature of their rooms.
This experiment was conducted as a final project for ENST-124 in the spring of 2026. Our experiment built off of a previous one conducted in the fall 2025 semester. We replicated the methods of that project to continue evaluating the effect of lawn…
Invasive vines such as Oriental Bittersweet have proliferated across the Northeastern United States (Kurtz 2018). These vines wrap around and strangle trees, block sunlight from reaching the undercanopy, and hinder animal (including human) activity…
The North American Beaver (Castor canadensis) is a keystone species that creates wetland habitats through dam construction, dramatically altering local hydrology and ecosystem composition. At the Vassar College Preserve, beaver activity has created a…
To complete a lighting audit of Vassar's academic building, we gathered data from a random sample of 10 academic buildings, and in each did a weekend nighttime and weekday daytime audit. From our data, we then calculated the electricity usage and…
We cored ten Amur Corktree specimens (nine on the Preserve at Vassar; one on the Arboretum) to estimate their ages. The collected data aided our investigation into the spread of this invasive species.
We studied two areas of stormwater institutes: a rain garden and a bioretention area, as well as two grass lawns. Through exploring these two environmental types, we attempted to explore if the green stormwater infrastructure is achieving its goal of…
We tested 4 locations on campus for the presence of sodium, calcium, magnesium, potassium, and chloride, which are present in road salts. We analyzed this data to see if road salts were affecting the soil on campus.