The Integrated Science Lab invites you to join the conversation at a Lunch Pitch. Judith Sarneel will give a pitch about the math behind decomposition, Erin Stafford will pitch about data connected to the spread of zoonotic diseases, and Léon Serre-Fredj will pitch about monitoring phytoplankton communities.
To encourage cross pollination of ideas between researchers from different disciplines, IceLab hosts interdisciplinary research lunches with the vision of allowing ideas to meet and mate. During the Lunch Pitch Season, the creative lunches take place at KBC (Glasburen) on a Wednesday.
Register to come to the pitch and reserve your lunch by Monday, 21 April at 10am.
Note! From now on the default lunch option is vegan. You can choose an alternative lunch in a separate form that will be emailed to you once you have registered.
Ecologists often study decomposition of plant litter material to understand greenhouse gas production and carbon storage. They assume litter decomposes following an exponential decay curve. However, the decomposition rates (k) that they calculate do not follow the mathematics that they assume. This could imply they are badly overlooking a mathematical, chemical or ecological process, or are in need of a new model. Connecting field ecologist, soil biologist, chemists and mathematicians may be needed to find a practical approach forward, leading to better understanding of mass loss ratios in the field.
Interested in: Talking to Mathematicians working with decay models, Chemists working with decomposition to better understand the chemistry during decomposition, field ecologists to hear how they think about decomposition.
Abstract
We have data collected in Thailand on bats, rodents, and the viruses they carry and aim to measure biodiversity at different human-animal interfaces (i.e., forest-edge, garbage dumps, temples with bat roosts), as well as to determine if there are significant differences in disease prevalence based on location or biodiversity.
During the pitch, I will describe the data collected in Thailand on animals that act as reservoir species for zoonotic diseases at human-animal interfaces and our current plan for using it.
Interested in: seeing if anyone has ideas about how we could further utilize the data. We are especially interested in hearing everyone’s thoughts on how to use this data to study dilution effects from biodiversity (or if that is possible).
Phytoplankton can display dynamics on an hour scale while most monitoring programs only measure it fortnightly. As phytoplankton is a cornerstone of aquatic environment health there is a need to quantify the information loss to yield more robust interpretation and be able to detect ecological change. New monitoring system such as automatic buoy equipped with sensors allows to produce high frequency dataset useful to assess the importance of sampling frequency. Establishing methods to determine the optimal frequency will enable optimization and characterization of environmental monitoring system.
Interested in: Generating an interdisciplinary collaboration to have a holistic approach on the topic of sampling frequency and information loss in environmental monitoring program.
KBC Glasburen, near the KBC café. Find your way to the venue (mazemap link)
IceLab Lunch Pitches are made possible through funding from KBC for the venue and lunches and from Stress Response Modeling at IceLab for their coordination.
