Scientists from the Smithsonian Institute’s Center for Tropical Forest Science (CTFS) are at Bradley University this week to train 11 botanists from around North America on databases developed by Bradley’s Computer Science and Information Systems students.
Bradley professor Dr. Steven Dolins’ friendship with Dr. Rick Condit, CTFS scientist, sparked the development of the project that has involved undergraduate students in the senior computer science capstone project course since 2006. At that time, students in the course began modifying a database created a year earlier by graduate students to include the ability to store the taxonomy of each tree and additional reporting tools. Dolins, who acts as the project manager for the students, has taken two groups of students to Panama since 2006 to give them face-to-face meetings with the biologists and IT data manager and to visit the rainforest where the data is collected.
The goal of the CTFS is to increase the understanding of the past, present, and future of tropical environments and their relevance to human welfare. Botanists with the Institute have collected data on more than six million trees from 6,000 species from tropical rainforests around the world. The database stores the diameter of each tree and their stems along with taxonomy and location information. The information then can be used by scientists to study how various tree species grow in nature, seed disbursement, animal behavior, and the impact of greenhouse gases, among other things.
“The department is proud to host this workshop at Bradley,” Dolins said. “One of our recent graduates will help train the botanists on using the data entry system developed last year by our students. It’s satisfying to see our student’s work being used to help the scientists manage their data.”
During his visit, Condit also will work with three senior students, Troy Earley, Krzysztof Mulica, and Matt Gerring in the computer science capstone project course on a project to perform analyses on the data after it’s collected. Besides Overholt, Anudeep Singh is also doing research work for the Center.
