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Central Park Radiation Test Among Science Studies Carried Out in City

By James Fanelli | September 17, 2014 7:26am
 Susan Elbin, the director of conservation and science at the New York City Audubon Society, releases an oystercatcher after banding the bird in Gateway National Recreation Area. Her group is tracking the population in the Rockaways.
Susan Elbin, the director of conservation and science at the New York City Audubon Society, releases an oystercatcher after banding the bird in Gateway National Recreation Area. Her group is tracking the population in the Rockaways.
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Courtesy of Shiloh Schulte, Manomet Center for Conservation Sciences

UPPER EAST SIDE — For four nights in June, Matthew Williamson pedaled through Central Park in the name of science.

With a Geiger counter and a GPS tracking device tucked into a basket fastened to the back of his mountain bike, the physicist crisscrossed Manhattan’s emerald oasis measuring radiation levels.

After getting the blessing of the city Parks Department and the local NYPD precinct, Williamson rode Central Park's pathways during the hours when it is closed to the public.

He chose that time because he wanted the park as empty as possible as his equipment captured and plotted the data with software similar to what joggers use to track their runs.

Williamson hasn’t yet studied the results but he hopes to plot his measurements soon to create a heat map of radiation levels in the park and the surrounding area.

“I'm a radiation safety professional and part of our job is understanding different sources of radiation, including natural background radiation,” Williamson told DNAinfo New York. “On a more local level, I was interested in understanding what the radiation could be in some relevant areas” like Central Park.

With nearly 30,000 acres of green space, marshland and beaches, New York City parks are the perfect petri dish for professional and amateur researchers hoping to conduct experiments and field studies on wildlife in a concrete jungle.

But before researchers can test the oxygen levels in soil in Fort Tryon Park or study the effects of dams on eels in the Bronx River Greenway, the Parks Department must issue them a permit. 

In the past year and a half, 74 permit applications, including Williamson’s radiation ride, were submitted to the agency, city records show.

The applicants included a Japanese scientist who wanted to study how swallowtail butterflies coexist in Central Park, a Penn State graduate student hoping to see whether city frogs handle stress from traffic noise better than their country counterparts and ornithologists banding wading birds to track their winter migrations.

Some researchers are professors and graduate students from major universities like Rutgers, Columbia and Yale. Williamson, who has a day job in the medical physics department at Memorial Sloan-Kettering Cancer Center, did his study for a graduate class he took at Lehman College in the spring.

Some researchers are teenage scientists from city public schools who are doing studies as part of their classwork. Last year, the New York Harbor School got permission to scuba dive in Jamaica Bay to determine if oysters, eelgrass and scallops exist there.

Other researchers come from venerable local institutions like the American Museum of Natural History and the New York Botanical Garden.

The New York City Audubon Society is one of the most prolific research groups in city green spaces, according to Parks Department records. It applied for four permits with the agency in the past year and a half.

Susan Elbin, the society’s director of conservation and science, handles her group’s applications and oversees many of its research projects. She said the permits are necessary so the Parks Department can regulate how much foot traffic occurs in wildlife sanctuaries.

“It really is important that it be a permitted activity,” she said. “We need to minimize the number of people who go on those islands and the amount of times they go.”

In recent years, her group has obtained permits to count nests of colonial waterbirds on uninhabited New York City islands, including Mill Rock, South Brother Island and Prall’s Island.

This April her group also banded oystercatchers, a breed of shore birds, in the Arverne section of the Rockaways to assess the population and track their migratory patterns. The society relies on bird watchers in southern coastal states to spot the bands and report sightings to a database on the Web.

“We’ve had reports of live-bird sightings in the Gulf Mexico and both coasts of Florida. One was in Alabama,” Elbin said. “It’s so exciting when I get a band report.”

As part of the permit application, researchers must summarize their projects, itemize their equipment and say whether any animals or plants will be collected. They must provide the specific site for their field work (the most popular location is Central Park). They must also say when they expect to finish the study and provide the city with the findings.

The Parks Department approves most applications — but not all of them.

Last year, ecologist Jennifer Tennessen, a doctoral candidate at Penn State University, asked to collect up to 90 wood frogs from Alley Pond Park and Potamogeton Pond in Queens. She wanted them as part of her experiment to see if city frogs showed lower stress levels when subjected to high-traffic noise than their brethren in more rural areas.

The Parks Department passed on the proposal.

“They thought my research would be too invasive,” Tennessen told DNAinfo.

Even approved research projects don’t always work out.

Last year, Dr. Terry Morley, a visiting professor at Marymount Manhattan College, got the OK to produce a “Virtual Central Park” application. Using GPS and a digital camera, Morley and two undergraduate students planned on creating an app that would identify trees and the natural history of the 843-acre green space to park-goers on their phones.

Morley, who has since moved to Ireland, said that they had to scrap the project “as it became completely impractical to work with the [Central Park] Conservancy.”

“So unfortunately, despite a very cool project, we had to stop,” he said.

Dr. Shin-Ichi Fukuoka’s research project also didn’t get off the ground — because his subjects were hard to find.

Last year, Fukuoka, a Japanese molecular biologist and a visiting professor at Rockefeller University, won approval to study how swallowtail butterflies share space, time and food in Central Park. He planned on spending from May 1, 2013, to March 31, 2014, going to the park once or twice a week to catch and release the insects. 

“My project on the swallowtail butterflies in Central Park basically failed,” he wrote in an email to DNAinfo. “I could not find enough number of the butterflies there in the last year and this year as well.”