Curb Scholar Summer Blog: Disa’s Eco-Informatics Research in the Cascades
This post was written by Disa Yu.
I spent this summer in the forests and mountains of the Cascades mountain range in eastern Oregon. We lived in the cabins of the H.J. Andrews Experimental Forest and conducted research in the field of Eco-Informatics. I thought that Eco-Informatics was a good example of the interdisciplinary creativity that happens at the Curb Center because it uses math and computer science to carry out ecological research.
For our research project, we studied the interactions between plants and pollinators in the montane meadow ecosystem. This involved driving for about an hour up the bumpy roads of the forest, and then hiking uphill for an additional hour to reach our research meadows up in the mountains. We collected data on the pollination interactions in these meadows by observing the pollinators as they landed on different flower species. We then used the data collected for this research project to conduct our individual eco-informatics research projects.
My project involved examining how the pollinators’ flower preferences affect the features of the pollination network. I basically wrote a series of programs in R to generate various interaction matrices that would result from different cases of pollinator preferences, and then computing the most ecologically relevant indices of the interaction matrices. I thought that it was really cool to have the opportunity to apply what I had learned in my math and computer science classes towards research in pollination ecology, and it was wonderful to be able to spend the summer working outside in the forests and mountains of Oregon.
