What first started as a research effort to collect an accurate account of all the trees at Cornell’s campus may turn out to be useful in the University’s plan to achieve carbon neutrality by 2050.

Over the summer, a tree inventory project was conducted by Fred Cowett, a Ph.D. student in horticulture, and Chris Gruber, a third-year graduate student in landscape architecture. In the course of two months, the project identified 7,205 trees, ranging across 225 species, throughout Cornell’s campus.

I’ve always been a bit of a conspiracy theorist. Okay, so perhaps not in the “Who shot JFK?/Where were the air craft carriers for Pearl Harbor?” sort of way… more like in the “CNN is the mouth piece of corporate America” sort of way… So when I stumbled upon an interesting little anomaly in Cornell’s Comprehensive Master Plan, involving a bit of photo-shopping, my first thought was “hold the presses”. My second thought was “well, no one’s updated CMYK in a while…”

Local emergency officials declared a Cornell student dead when his body was recovered from Fall Creek Gorge below the suspension bridge leading to North Campus last night around 9:20 p.m. He was later identified as 18-year-old Douglas Lowe from Shelton, Conn, a student in the School of Industrial and Labor Relations. Lowe was said to have been swimming in the gorge with about 12 other people when his body was pulled under the current, the Ithaca Journal reported. He slid down a smooth rock surface that leads to a swirling pool of collected water — often a popular swimming spot for Cornellians.

As the weather gets colder and snow continues to pile up, the idea of an alternate route underneath the surface of the Cornell campus is very appealing. Coincidently, there are a few tunnels buried beneath the University’s grounds. Most of them, however, are inaccessible to the public.

“It all depends on your definition of a tunnel. There are things underground that you could crawl through, that have utilities and various other things running through them,” said Frank Popowitch of the Campus Planning Office. “But as far as the amount [sic] of tunnels available to the public on a campus of this size, there really aren’t that many.”