Budding scientist monitors Mason’s iconic cherry blossoms

Colleen Rich — Mon, 27 Mar 2023 17:39:03 +0000

Budding scientist monitors Mason’s iconic cherry blossoms Colleen Rich Mon, 03/27/2023 - 13:39

In This Story

Over the last year, George Mason University graduate student Jamie Roth has been leading an interdisciplinary research project alongside faculty members in biology and statistics.

Mason's cherry blossom monitoring team (from left) includes Jonathan Auerbach, Jamie Roth, David Kepplinger, and Daniel Hanley. Photo by Genamarie McCant/Mason Facilities

Roth designed this project as a long-term opportunity to teach Mason students to collect, process, analyze, and communicate about data using resources available on campus. The long-term data will reflect how Mason’s local ecosystem responds to the effects of climate change and create a visible marker for an otherwise invisible impact.

By having Mason statistics students collect and analyze data on the bloom date of the cherry blossom trees at Mason Pond, as a part of their coursework in STAT 490 Capstone in Statistics and STAT 634 Case Studies in Data Analysis, and integrating it with Mason’s local meteorological data, variations can be tracked over time to build a more accurate model for the bloom date of the cherry blossom trees at Mason.

To implement this project, Roth received funding from Office of University Sustainability’s Patriot Green Fund, a grant from Mason Facilities that allows the campus community to develop infrastructure solutions that reduce Mason’s environmental impact as well as support student research projects that explore sustainability topics in the region.

Trail cameras and a weather station monitor the campus cherry blossoms over time. Photo by Genamarie McCant/Mason Facilities

With this support, the project team, which includes faculty members Jonathan Auerbach and David Kepplinger in the Department of Statistics and Daniel Hanley in the Biology Department, worked collaboratively with Mason Facilities Project Manager Nick Valadez to determine the best locations to mount trail cameras and a weather station in order to monitor the cherry blossoms over time. This was key to the project because even a minor variation in the microclimate can affect phenological events, like bloom times. Once that information was determined, Abu Monjer, a project manager in Facilities Management, supported the installations in time for the project to launch for this year’s blooms.

“This project has been a great opportunity for me to tie together local climate data to the flora on the Mason [Fairfax] Campus and hopefully lay groundwork for future environmental projects,” said Roth, who is majoring in biostatistics.

This research builds on the international Cherry Blossom Prediction Competition, which Auerbach and Kepplinger help organize. This competition assembles data on the peak bloom date of cherry trees all over the world, from Kyoto, Japan, to Vancouver, British Columbia, and this project will bring Mason into this global arena, ensuring our ecosystem is represented.

This initiative is a pilot project for the Institute for a Sustainable Earth’s Mason Living Labs Initiative, which is designed to encourage and support students, faculty, and staff to pose questions, experiment, gather data, monitor changes, and propose novel solutions to a range of sustainability challenges associated with the university’s campus environments and its socio-environmental systems. Learn more about the Living Labs initiative and the Cherry Blossom Monitoring project during the virtual event launch on April 12, 2023, at 2 p.m.

Topics

cherry blossoms

Research

Institute for a Sustainable Earth (ISE)

Facilities

Sustainability

Mason Living Labs Initiative

CEC faculty research

Three-day event highlights sustainability research

Colleen Rich — Thu, 26 Sep 2019 16:13:12 +0000

Three-day event highlights sustainability research Colleen Rich Thu, 09/26/2019 - 12:13

This is STAR-TIDES's third year holding its sustainability research demonstration on Mason's Fairfax Campus. Photo provided.

From Sept. 30 to Oct. 2, George Mason University’s Fairfax Campus will host a major technology demonstration focused on a global knowledge-sharing network called STAR-TIDES, which is an acronym for Sharing To Accelerate Research—Transformative Innovation for Development and Emergency Support. STAR-TIDES, which is affiliated with Mason’s Institute for a Sustainable Earth (ISE), is devoted to building sustainable resilience and improving humanitarian assistance and disaster recovery.

This year’s demo will open at noon on Monday, Sept. 30, with a keynote address by Vint Cerf, one of the pioneers of the Internet, in Merten Hall, Room 1201, followed by other speakers, in parallel with demonstrations on the lawn near the Panda Express. Cerf, often called the “father of the Internet,” also holds an honorary doctor of science from Mason, which he was awarded in 2000.

The three days of exhibits and demonstrations on the Merten Lawn will address such topics as energy storage, 3D printing, information and communications technology (ICT), drones and geographic information systems, public health, and humanitarian assistance and disaster recovery. The event also will explore how the exhibitors could contribute to two broad scenarios: hurricane and flooding disaster relief and infrastructure resilience, including work being done in Puerto Rico, and increasing resilience in interdependent critical infrastructures in Northern Virginia.

STAR-TIDES is overseen by Mason's new transdisciplinary Center for Resilient and Sustainable Communities, in affiliation with ISE. The center has a vision that communities worldwide can create life-changing social and economic opportunities through locally led, bottom-up resilience and sustainability initiatives supported by cross-cutting approaches and effective, replicable models. It builds on work begun by Mason’s Community Resilience Lab over the past 18 months.

Since this demo is designed to showcase equipment that works under field conditions, there are no rain dates. The hours will be 11:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Monday, 8:30 a.m. to 6 p.m. Tuesday, and 8:30 a.m. to 3 p.m. on Wednesday. There will be incentives for student attendance like free food, T-shirts, contests and, in some cases, class credits.

For more information about the initiative, see star-tides.net.