Second row: Austin Carroll, Kelly McConville, Calvin Bailey, Rebecca Beneroff
This past summer, Kelly McConville (Director of the Dominguez Center for Data Science) and Grayson White (Visiting Assistant Professor at Reed College), supervised an amazing team of researchers through the Bucknell Undergraduate Forestry Data Science Research Program. The researchers included Austin Carroll (Statistics ‘26), Celine Chang (Applied Math ‘27), Odilon Ligan (Computer Science and Engineering ‘27), William Lindquist (Statistics ‘27), Jean Marie Ngabonziza (Computer Science and Engineering ‘26), Fayrene Nguyen (Business Analytics ‘26) and Calvin Bailey (Data Analytics ‘25, Denison). Rebecca Beneroff (Biology ‘25) also served as a research mentor for the program.
Second row: Calvin Bailey and Grayson White
Over the course of eight weeks, the team worked closely with George Gaines, Tracey Frescino, and Andy Lister of the US Forest Service Forest Inventory and Analysis Program. The team tackled 5 projects which included a simulation study to estimate losses after forest fires, software development for better estimating uncertainty, an exploration of the merits of differential privacy, an evaluation of different synthetic populations for forest attributes, and development of an AI-tool for detecting land use on forestry plots. The students learned about forest inventory, wrote a lot of code, gave a bunch of presentations, and even traveled to Montana to share their work!
This collaboration was made possible by a grant from the Rocky Mountain Research Station of the US Forest Service.