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Possible L-490 projects

L-490 Project areas
Project 1 - Species range shifts
Project 2 - Use PERL to map life and mine data
Project 3 - Mapping life on Earth
Self-directed projects

Introduction
First of all, it is good you are at this page. That means you are thinking about an L-490 project. Having research experience and even publications on your resume is essential for graduate school, and otherwise considered very valuable by future employers/admissions boards. Aside from resumes, it is good experience just to have. Read my descriptions below, but if you want to do something different than what I can help you with - contact me anyway. I know a lot of researchers at IU and may be able to help you find someone to work with. That said, if you decide to work with me and Dr. Watson, my advisor, we can say you will gain computer software experience, methodological experience and possibly publications. Such experience includes learning practical statistical methods, computer software that is generally applicable in research and beyond, and many other transferable skills. On this webpage I have a list of the skills you may learn while working with our lab. We also love learning and research in general. Enjoy the description.

Biogeography & Conservation Research
The purpose of this page is to detail possible areas of research that undergraduates could pursue as part of L-490 research credit. Most of the work and projects I will describe below are biogeographical, though the relevance of such research extends well beyond biogeography. Geography is the study of spatial variation. Therefore, biogeography is the study of the spatial variation of life. Biogeography is a "synthetic subject", like mathematics, which means biogeography is really not a subject at all, in one sense. Rather biogeography is a method or a way of looking at things, looking at the geographical pattern. It is possible to study just about anything in biology geographically. This includes ecology, ecosystem ecology, population ecology, evolution, genetics, and on. A major theme in biogeography is "pattern/process". A biogeographer finds patterns, and tries to infer the underlying process giving rise to observed patterns. These may be evolutionary processes, ecological processes, genetic processes, population processes, and on and on. The patterns a biogeographer finds both become part of what needs to be explained by hypotheses and theory, and also can be used as evidence to lend support to hypotheses and theory; some of these hypotheses are not immediately related to "biogeography". Though biogeography is an open subject applicable to many corners of biology, to be sure, there are well developed fields of biogeography with well developed methods, like ecological biogeography, historical biogeography, and the more recently termed macroecology.

Biogeography is often an historical science and an empirical science. This means that it may be difficult to design experiments that are practical to undertake. It is often difficult to remove confounding variables. This is especially true in biogeography of continental patterns (what I focus on). Instead biogeographers focus on interpreting pattern and finding natural experiments. This means biogeographical inferences are often qualified, and are based on cumulative evidence from more than one line of inquiry, rather than definitive experiments. If this discussion is a little terse for you that's ok, because our knowledge of the geography of life on Earth is actually rather poor; this means it is possible to jump right into studying it, making contributions almost as soon as you start.

Conservation & Impact
The impact of biogeography is pretty substantial. If we want to conserve species, we need to know where they are. If you are interested in this kind of impact, I have the knowledge necessary to assist you to map a major branch of life (think kingdom, division/phylum, class, order). There are many large holes in our picture of the geography of life on Earth, with information scattered among dusty shelves. A second major area of impact also related to conservation is this: research into what controls species geographical distributions will likely help us understand how species ranges will respond to climate change, whether caused by humans or not, and hence assist us in future conservation efforts. Many species range models and species range shift models are not well validated. One project idea addresses this, and has the potential for high impact.

Skills - Subjects - a short list of what you can learn
This is a short list of subjects and skills that you could learn working in our lab. Many of these techniques and areas of research are actually easier to understand than you might expect. I will assist you and provide one on one help, getting you up to speed relatively quickly on the methods of research and the current knowledge of the fields. Again, many of the skills listed below are very transferable, some more than others. If you are interested we can talk about how broadly transferable the different skills are, and, we can talk about which kinds of research projects would enable you to develop which skills.

Biodiversity science
Conservation science
Bioinformatics
Biogeography - evolutionary biogeogeography - genetic biogeography...
Computer software including,
Geographical Information System  (GIS) software, such as ESRI, Manifold, Grass, and Idris
Statistical software, Minitab, SPSS
Database software, Microsoft Access
Microsoft Excel
Computer languages, PERL
You will learn basic and practical statistical  methods
Geographical analysis techniques and statistics