Have you ever wondered how the surrounding environment of a park impacts its species? There are many factors that provide context to the differences between the parks we researched, such as the history of creation, the difference in socioeconomic status surrounding the parks, and urbanization.
As New York City battles rising air quality concerns, it would be helpful to use lichens, an indicator species, as a predictor for how our ecology might change in the future.
What’s happening to the U.S. bee population? Is there truly a correlation between carbon emissions and bee populations? Or is it all coincidence?
Harmful Algae Blooms (HABS), an invasive species, have long since invaded many territories through their tenacity. Through this project, we visualize based on Dataset Reports and support this evidence.
Monarchs are highly abundant in NY and we observed several monarch butterflies during our time at the 2022 bio blitz. A variety of research points to bright colors being associated with a species being poisonous or dangerous (i.e. Monarch eating milkweed plant). We extrapolated on this knowledge and decided to conduct this study to see if colorful butterfly species would be more abundant than less colorful or cryptic butterflies. We compiled data into graphs of three different categories – Monarch butterflies were our control, colorful butterflies – were butterflies with more than 2 colors, and cryptic butterflies with 2 or fewer colors. One of the graphs we compiled lists the populations of 8 different species of butterflies from 2019 to 2022, graph 2 shows the percentages of butterflies over the total number of species, and graph 3 shows the portion of the population of butterflies as we placed them in three categories – colorful, cryptic, control. We were able to determine that the most common butterflies observed in the study were the Monarch, Painted Lady, and Cabbage White. The least observed butterflies were Pipevine swallowtail, Eastern tiger swallowtail, Zabulon Skipper, and Black Swallowtail. Our graphs suggest that the cryptic butterflies were on average more abundant than colorful butterflies, thus suggesting that our initial hypothesis had to be modified. Our research was a preliminary study and we hope to expand on this research in the future.
Ginkgo trees are impressively resilient plants with long lifespans and strong resistances to drought, diseases, pollution, and poor soil. We investigate whether or not ginkgo trees significantly improve air quality.
This project examines the population growth of spotted lanternflies at Randall’s Island based on iNaturalist data gathered at the Macaulay annual BioBlitz.
A correlation study between Spotted Lanternfly observations made on iNaturalist and humidity levels and temperature from 2020 to present.
We decided to look into how temperature changes during the winter months due to climate change have affected the bee population in NYC through iNaturalist observations.
To purpose of determining the effects of abnormal temperature changes on the migration pattern of Canadian Geese in New York City, we analyzed temperature changes and average number of Canadian Geese.
