Mast and Mammals

I worked with North Carolina State University, Duke University, and the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences' Biodiversity Lab to collect data on seed production and mammal populations across the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON).

The Mast and Mammals Project will analyze the contribution of mast (fruit and seed production by trees and shrubs) to wildlife ecology across several research sites operated by NEON, a vast network of facilities collecting open-sourced data on various ecological conditions across the United States. The results of this analysis will be used to evaluate how mammal communities are responding to changes in mast production brought on by climate change.

I set eight camera trap arrays within NEON field sites across seven states in the summer of 2019. We have processed 500 camera trap sites and over 300,000 wildlife photos. This slideshow displays some of the wildlife we photographed in the summer of 2019:

Elk (Cervus canadensis)

Doe, Mountain Research Station, Nederland, CO

Bobcat (Lynx rufus)

The elusive bobcat caught on camera at the Disney Wilderness Preserve, FL.

I helped identify 62 mammal and bird species from various American ecosystems. I recently created an interactive Tableau visualization for this project with built-in analyses and usable content of species observations that we shared with staff from each field site. Below, you can see our results from mammal community comparisons across all sites from 2019.