.jpg)
Have you
ever wondered how successful our wildlife species have been at repopulating
after being listed on the Endangered Species Act? I mean, we tend to only hear about
the big success stories like the gray wolf and California condor—and even today
those species are still having difficulties thriving— but what about the rest
of our wildlife? How far along are their populations’ progressing? How much has
government funding of American conservation work contributed to the wellbeing
of the listed species?
When I heard
that, my current research mentor, Professor Luther was conducting an analysis
of endangered and threatened avifauna populations and their correlation with the
conservation actions carried out by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service (USFWS),
I took instant interest in the project! Before this time last semester, I wouldn’t
have really stopped to consider these questions involving the relationship
between wildlife recovery and government involvement. More, I would never have imagined
myself involved in this type of research. I spent hours upon hours of reading (sometimes
poorly organized) recovery action plans prepared by the USFWS, and manually
plugging in a lot of information into a large database. I’d really only
previously envisioned myself getting involved in field based research, but this
project peeked my interest for obvious reasons.
After
contributing a whole semester to this project, and discussing a potential
individual research project based on this large data set with my mentor, I’d
realized there were many different facets to this species conservation data
that could be analyzed and looked at in more depth. Hence, I decided to
continue contributing to this developing research topic as these data had never
before been analyzed and the results could be a potentially useful evaluation
of the Endangered Species Act (ESA) for the USFWS, the Department of the
Interior, and legislators. This semester, I am specifically looking at
government funding of species conservation listed on the ESA and whether it
correlates with the decrease or increase in wildlife populations over the years
ESA monies have funded said conservation actions.
At this
point of the research, I am wrapping up crunching numbers into a database from
USFWS expenditure reports and am moving into the last stages of data analysis.
It’s been a lot of work, and it will be exciting to see what results are
yielded from the analysis. In terms of my experience, working with big data has
not been the most exciting mode of research but it’s the significance behind
the numbers which hold a very real and contemporary pertinence. Especially
since my internship with the USFWS this past summer and the endangered species
work I was involved in, this project hits home as I have experienced firsthand
the effort put into conserving species and have witnessed the struggle that
species are having trying to live their lives and reproduce. Big data has
come to the forefront of many biological studies.
My experience in this research has
.JPG)
