I am looking for SACNAS students with an interest in Biodiversity Informatics with Spanish language skills or with familiarity with computer languages such as Perl. There is a potential for paid work on a grant or summer research provided students look toward departmental and outside grants. I assist students with the grant writing process. Last summer an L490 student and I were successful obtaining funds for summer research. Authorship on publications is a possibility.
What I am doing
Spanish language skills are very useful for this research
I am mapping all the New World ferns, a major group of plants, from published but paper sources (books called "floras" which contain species descriptions and geographical presences). I am using Perl, a computer language, to extract this data from these books and then I convert it to GIS (computer map formats like the one on the left) a much more flexible format. Once in this format I look for potential climatic controls on species diversity, with an eye towards understanding the evolution of geographical distribution of species.
Several of the important sources for information are in Spanish. While it is possible to extract structured data from a source with minimal Spanish, better knowledge of the language is a big plus for this work. Last summer Taylor Wahlig, a sophomore at the time, worked with me and we mapped the Mexico and Puerto Rica ferns. These texts are both in English, but other important regions such as Colombia and Chile are covered by Spanish language books.
If you join this effort you will learn highly transferable skills (to all sciences), such as Perl or GIS, and specifically you will learn about the science of floristics (the accounting and description of Earth's plant biodiversity). Finally and most importantly, through synthesis of existing knowledge, you will contribute to our knowledge of Latin American plant diversity.
