BIOL 7800 - Biodiversity & Macroecology

My first semester at LSU is quickly coming to a close. It has gone really fast and the work so far has been enjoyable but at times a bit overwhelming. The highlight so far was the final class of my biodiversity and macroecology course I talked about in an earlier post. The final class consisted of a 15 minute presentation by each student on a project related to the class content which they had been working on during the semester. So, on Wednesday morning we sat through four hours of twelve really high quality presentations on some diverse and interesting topics. Now I only have my final statistics exam early next week and the semester will be officially over!

I've embedded the presentation I gave in this blog post because it's some work I'm pretty proud of. I spent many hours slaving over the data and various data analysis programs to get the results that I did. My presentation was pretty well received by the rest of my class judging by the comments they gave me, I just hope my grade will reflect that too! Hopefully the main points of my research are able to be understood by those without an ecology background, or you can even just enjoy the great photographs! There's still a huge amount of further analysis that can be done on this and the many other kinds of data we collected during the field work for this project; it's exciting to think of what interesting patterns we may uncover. However, for now it's definitely interesting to find that restoration of native sand dunes is not largely altering their beetle assemblages, although we may still find evidence to dispute this.

Make sure you view it in full screen by clicking the icon on the bottom right of the powerpoint slides.