Student Experiences

After hearing about the REU from her department, Eliza, an environmental science major and Spanish minor from the University of Indiana, felt impassioned to apply. Eliza wanted to improve her technical skills and apply them to her environmental research. With a strong background in the humanities, Eliza looked forward to a new cross-disciplinary experience. Eliza’s REU project uses remote sensing technology to teach computers how to identify tree populations with the intention of dramatically streamlining the identification process in a given region. Since her project was a dramatic departure from her usual studies, Eliza seized upon the opportunity to teach herself a myriad of new subjects. “It’s a public service to ask the most basic questions, like ‘what’s color’ and ‘how does light work’” Eliza says. To obtain data, the team used a spectrometer, a device that takes pictures and gathers the spectral reading of each pixel. In theory, each tree species has a unique color pattern, not visible to the human eye, that could later be cataloged into a library of tree species. Eliza spent her time on River Ridge Ranch mapping tree locations and comparing these locations to the data collected by the spectrometer, as a way to verify the light signatures. Eliza hopes that with these novel mappings she can draw conclusions about the array trees that grow in relation to the water and to each other. Such a theory had first been introduced to Eliza during her earlier work in Peru, where she participated in planting fruit trees and learning how to reforest consciously. Eliza contends that this information could aid in reforestation work, where conservationists could be armed with a greater knowledge of the most successful planting patterns for a man-made forest.