Email me as ja.stallins@uky.edu
if you have any questions. Check out the rest of my blog for more detail about this research.
Honey bee pollen
foraging and land use. I’ve collected pollen from an urban apiary here in Lexington. I would
like to identify the pollen using standard light microscope protocols and assay
the pollen for amino acid composition to determine its nutritional quality. A
number of studies have commented on the higher diversity of plants in some
humanized landscapes, however, whether or not this pollen is of high or low
nutritional quality hasn’t been established. I’d work with you to learn some
basic pollen id. I’d love to
have someone interested in learning how to be a beekeeper and setting up a colony
in the spring. There’s a potential for some qualitative research – I would like
to have someone interview beekeepers regarding general issues they have
encountered regarding land use, land zoning, and finding forage for their honey
bees. Sadly, the political ecology aspects of beekeeping remain underdeveloped, and any of this work could easily become the basis of a master's thesis, dissertation, or an undergraduate research project.
Wildlife rehabilitation, race, and biodiversity. The analyses of this project are done. I’ve mapped the locations of where people live that brought injured animals to a wildlife rehabilitation center in Tallahassee, Florida – about 20,000 animals over a 7 year period. I used to geographically weighted regression to visualize who brings in these animals. There are a lot of points this work raises about race, class, and attitudes about wildlife. It also brings up the concept of incidental biodiversity – the biodiversity that is present but often undocumented except by chance encounter. I’d love to have someone take up some of the writing, or, replicate this project using wildlife rehabilitation data for our area in a thesis or PhD. It could be a good GIS learning experience if you were to replicate this project here in Kentucky.
Structure-from-motion photography. I am looking for someone to continue working with me on learning SFM. This involves using ground-based, paint pole, or kite-based photography to construct three-dimensional images. A friend of mine who works in stream restoration has given me the okay to come out sometime this January or February to map a work site of his. This project would be a good way to get some GIS and GPS experience; however, it’s like most on-the-fly work you do with GIS, sometimes you have to dig to figure out what button to push. I can get you started, but I have progressed to the point where I don't have enough time to refine the techniques.
LIDAR dune topography database construction. One of our PhD students is going to need some assistance constructing a database of topographic measurements from barrier islands along the Atlantic coast. You would learn how to download and set up lidar data sets and how to manipulate lidar data to get it into a format that we need for geostatistical analyses. There are several facets of this work that could easily become a master's thesis or undergraduate research project.
Wildlife rehabilitation, race, and biodiversity. The analyses of this project are done. I’ve mapped the locations of where people live that brought injured animals to a wildlife rehabilitation center in Tallahassee, Florida – about 20,000 animals over a 7 year period. I used to geographically weighted regression to visualize who brings in these animals. There are a lot of points this work raises about race, class, and attitudes about wildlife. It also brings up the concept of incidental biodiversity – the biodiversity that is present but often undocumented except by chance encounter. I’d love to have someone take up some of the writing, or, replicate this project using wildlife rehabilitation data for our area in a thesis or PhD. It could be a good GIS learning experience if you were to replicate this project here in Kentucky.
Structure-from-motion photography. I am looking for someone to continue working with me on learning SFM. This involves using ground-based, paint pole, or kite-based photography to construct three-dimensional images. A friend of mine who works in stream restoration has given me the okay to come out sometime this January or February to map a work site of his. This project would be a good way to get some GIS and GPS experience; however, it’s like most on-the-fly work you do with GIS, sometimes you have to dig to figure out what button to push. I can get you started, but I have progressed to the point where I don't have enough time to refine the techniques.
LIDAR dune topography database construction. One of our PhD students is going to need some assistance constructing a database of topographic measurements from barrier islands along the Atlantic coast. You would learn how to download and set up lidar data sets and how to manipulate lidar data to get it into a format that we need for geostatistical analyses. There are several facets of this work that could easily become a master's thesis or undergraduate research project.
Barrier island dune
vegetation analysis. A field class I taught last spring travelled to Sapelo Island, Georgia in
May. We collected dune vegetation compositional data in a location that I had
sampled about fifteen years earlier. I’m looking for someone to analyze this
data under my guidance and make some statements about how the topography and vegetation has
changed. You would learn how to use a PC-Ord ecological software package and gain experience with the trench-level work of exploratory statistical analysis.
