On this week’s SciFiles, your hosts Chelsie and Daniel interview Andrew Deleruyelle. How can one go about measuring the effects forests have on combatting climate change? As a student of forestry, Andrew has observed changing climates and wondered what can be done to quantify the largescale ecological patterns they’re experiencing. When Andrew finished an ecological data monitoring and analysis course taught by MSU professor Dr. Andrew Finley, he wanted to continue learning about the forest’s impact on these processes. Funded under the National Aeronautics and Space Administration’s Forest Carbon Estimation (ForCE) project, his research under Dr. Finley led him to an existing toolset: The US Forest Service (USFS) National Volume and Biomass Estimator Libraries.
These libraries proved to be useful for Forest Service employees, but remained inaccessible to the general public and mainly focused on the forests within North America. Andrew’s research has been focused on writing an interface in the R computer language for these libraries, a project he calls TimbuR. Andrew’s current focus, now that his research has concluded, is to bring TimbuR to the public as free-to-use software and expand its ability to serve global audiences.
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