Seeking last-minute applicants for REU position at HJ Andrews Forest,
June 16-August 24, 2013.
We seek qualified applicants to participate in a plant-pollinator
network project integrating ecology and computer science as part of
the Ecoinformatics Summer Institute, based at the HJ Andrews
Experimental Forest in western Oregon. We seek applicants with
expertise in biology, botany, zoology, entomology to participate in
field sampling and computer analysis of plant-pollinator networks.
This project combines ecological studies of plants and insect
pollinators with computer science analysis of species interaction
networks and their properties. Interactions between plants and their
pollinators influence biodiversity of both groups. Often
plant-pollinator networks are asymmetric, so that if a plant species
depends highly on an insect, that insect depends weakly on the plant;
this kind of structure is believed to confer resilience and enhance
diversity. In the Andrews Forest, montane meadows contain many dozens
of flowering plant species and several hundred species of
pollinators. This project will involve systematic monitoring of
pollinator-plant interactions in montane meadows, adding to a dataset
collected on two prior years. The ecology work involves fieldwork and
plant/pollinator sampling and identification led by Julia Jones, Andy
Moldenke, and Vera Pfeiffer. In addition to fieldwork, REU students
will conduct analyses of networks sampled in previous years. The
computer science analyses will be led by Tom Dietterich and Rebecca
Hutchinson, and will involve measuring the impact of partial
detection on the analysis of pollinator network data. In most field
data studies (especially for animals), an observer may fail to
observe the presence of an animal even though the animal is present.
Methods have been developed for accounting for partial detection in
studies of population dynamics and species distributions, but not
with the measurement of pollinator networks. So we want to explore
both experimentally, mathematically, and computationally how
detection failures (and maybe also identification errors) could
affect the conclusions drawn about pollinator networks. Please apply
by June 5 at
<http://eco-informatics.engr.oregonstate.edu/>http://eco-informatics.engr.oregonstate.edu/.
Thanks, please let me know if it is possible to post this
announcement. We only recently received NSF notification of this
funding and have had difficulty identifying qualified applicants.
Best,
Julia Jones
Professor, Geography, Oregon State University
<file:///C:/Users/DAVIDI~1/AppData/Local/Temp/[email protected]>[email protected]
