On Tuesday evening, students and community members gathered in Hunt Library’s Teaching and Visualization Lab to attend this semester’s Wolfpack Citizen Science Challenge closing event.
The Wolfpack Citizen Science Challenge is a project that consists of volunteer teams taking camera trap photos of wildlife living around the greater Raleigh area. Teams competed with each other as they simultaneously gathered data.The primary event presenter and project organizer was NC State professor and zoologist Roland Kays.
“The Wolfpack Challenge had two motivations: One was we wanted to learn about the animals that are on campus and what species are living on campus,” said Kays, head of the Biodiversity Research Lab at the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences. “The other was we wanted to get people involved in science and help people learn what science is and how it works.”
Results concluded that on NC State’s campus, there’s more biodiversity than meets the eye. While many are aware of the abundance of squirrels, lesser-known mammals are also present.
According to researchers, camera traps caught an extensive number of white-tailed deer, raccoons and possums roaming around campus.
“I’ve been here since 2004, and personally, I haven’t seen anything other than squirrels and maybe a deer or two,” said Zach Miller, a graduate student in the Department of Forest Biomaterials. “I haven’t seen any foxes or possums so [the event] did broaden my understanding of the wildlife diversity of campus.”
During the presentation, three NC State students presented their findings alongside Kays.
Each presenter utilized the Teaching and Visualization Lab’s 270-degree projector screen to engage spectators in lessons that not only illustrated the high level of diversity in the Raleigh area, but evaluated the greater implications of the results.
From the photo data, information was shared regarding the likely habitat ranges for the Virginia opossum, eastern chipmunk and striped skunk.
From these images, researchers were then able to further understand potential colonization patterns and whether various species were more or less likely to settle down in urban, suburban or rural environments.
However, most importantly the data and photos helped indicate the potential impacts urban development might have on biodiversity.
To assist in this extensive transfer of information, the presenters utilized many graphs and pie charts. This helped create a productive setting.
“It was really cool getting to be more involved,” said Julianna Nieuwsma, a graduate student and event presenter studying zoology. “One reason I was excited about getting involved with this was getting to interact with the public. In zoology, I’m interested in getting into that public education side of it, so I like how it gave me the chance to explain the science that a lot of people don’t know about and give it to the public.”
In the near future, a larger project that heavily emulates NC State’s Wolfpack Citizen’s Challenge is scheduled to take off.
“We’re taking this approach we’ve done on campus now and we’re spreading it across the state,” Kays said. “We’re having volunteers run cameras in all 100 counties across the state. That starts this winter and will go for three years.”
Kays emphasized that there would be similar events in the future.
“The last event we did here was a sellout,” Kays said. “So, we’re going to do a re-do of that in January or February of this year. It’s actually a presentation about coyotes with a live soundtrack by a musician, and so it’s a live DJ playing music at the same time I talk about coyotes, how coyotes hybridize with wolves and dogs to become who they are today, and how they are spreading into cities.”
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