UF Biology Semester of Immersion - Treetop Biodiversity

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In the spring semester of 2018, I was selected to participate in the University of Florida Biology Department's Spring Semester of Immersion. This program involved taking a single course at a time and meeting every day for about 5-6 weeks. One of the courses I took was Treetop Biodiversity. I conducted a survey of plant and lichen species around central and southern Florida with Dr. Christine Davis and Dr. Norman Douglas. We climbed several types of trees and collected epiphytes. During this course, I completed a project analyzing the frequency of vascular and nonvascular epiphytes at varying heights on Florida trees.

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UF Biology Semester of Immersion - Desert Biodiversity

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In the same Semester of Immersion program, I took a Desert Biodiversity course in which I travelled with Dr. Douglas and a few other students for two weeks to the deserts of California, Arizona, and Nevada, where we visited several national and state parks and collected images and location data of a variety of local flora and fauna groups. This data was then uploaded to the website iNaturalist for use by scientists conducting population ecology research. I decided to focus specifically on the local insects for my project and was able to find several hundred samples of about 50 unique species during the course of my trip. 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

 

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Growing Sand Verbenas​

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I am currently working on a research project with Dr. Douglas in which I am collecting achenes from the anthocarps of several species of the family Nyctaginaceae, with a focus on the sand verbenas of the genera Abronia and Tripterocalyx. I am germinating the achenes in a diluted ethylene solution in petri dishes until they start to develop root hairs, at which point I transfer them into a mixture of soil, sand, and vermiculite. Once they grow and develop flowers, we plan to collect pollen and test their ability to self-pollinate as well as to hybridize with other related species.

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Analyzing Microsatellite Data

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Beginning in the fall of 2019, I started receiving research credit for a separate project I am working on with Dr. Douglas. This project involved the analysis of data which Dr. Douglas had collected alongside several graduate students in previous years. This data was geolocation and microsatellite information collected from samples of Sporobolus nealleyi, (Gypsum Dropseed, Poaceae) and Dicranocarpus parviflorus, (Pitchfork, Asteraceae), two species of gypsyphile flowering plants with a modern distribution across Mexico and the southwest USA. My main responsibility has been to perform data analysis in RStudio and other related programs; I first used TANDEM software to correct any slight frame shifts in the microsatellite data that would cause individuals with the same number of repeating units to have different values in our data sets. I then used several packages in RStudio to estimate population genetic parameters such as observed and expected heterozygosity, linkage disequilibrium, and frequency of null alleles of the data for S. nealleyi. Most recently, I used STRUCTURE and STRUCTURE HARVESTER to estimate and then visualize the most likely subpopulations, respectively.

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