Mandy Huang

Undergraduate Fellow

If you met someone casually on the street, what would you tell them that you do for your research at Tyson?

“I look at how biodiversity changes from urban to rural areas. I look at how mammals inhabit or use green spaces like parks, golf courses, and cemeteries.

I am the only undergraduate fellow on the Wildlife Monitoring and Applied Conservation Team. At the beginning I did a lot of photo-tagging. We have 34 camera traps set up between the St. Louis Arch and Eureka, Missouri. They're motion-activated, so the cameras take pictures of animals passing by. We go through all those pictures and we tag what animals are there, how many of them are there, and we use that data to look at relationships. This is part of the Urban Wildlife Information Network. There are a bunch of these studies across the country, in the Chicago area and other big cities, that study similar urban to rural gradients. I'm able to download the St. Louis data and see if we can find different relationships and understand better the animal behavior from urban to rural systems, or how green spaces can serve as habitats to facilitate biodiversity.

In the beginning of the summer I did a lot of tagging and reading papers. Right now, we currently have the SIFTers, high school students in the Shaw Institute for Field Training. There are fifteen of them also doing photo tagging. I'm helping them tag their animals. They're doing great; they do so much! So, I kind of stepped back.

I am starting to look at the data and at my research question, trying to come up with what Beth calls the raw descriptors for the data. There is naive occupancy—how many camera sites the animal appears in—over total camera sites, and the trapping rate, which is the number of days that it appears over the total amount of days that we have cameras out. I'm doing the basic information for that. And then I'm also working on finding my covariates that I want to look at with my animal data. That's what I’m doing right now.”

Mandy worked with Beth Biro’s Wildlife Monitoring and Applied Conservation team during summer 2020. Learn more about the St. Louis Wildlife Project here.