:: Bradley University ::

Students build database for Smithsonian rainforest research

Walking through a rainforest with the sound of monkeys snacking on leaves in the trees above is not how most computer science majors spend their winter break. But that’s exactly what a group of Bradley students did in December 2006. Four of the five students in the Computer Science Capstone Project course traveled to Barro Colorado Island in the Panama Canal where they met with their clients from the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute (STRI). The students are modifying a database, building reports, and designing and building a user interface that STRI will use to store information about trees in the rainforest and to understand their growth.

Group image

Dr. Steven Dolins (right) and computer science and information systems students, (left to right), Gabrielle Olivera, Andrew Sablan, Tyler Tippet, and Brooke Barnabe, visited the STRI facility.

The goal of STRI is to increase the understanding of the past, present, and future of tropical environments and their relevance to human welfare. Botanists and zoologists with the institute have collected data on more than six million trees from 6,000 species from tropical rainforests around the world. On Barro Colorado Island, the rainforest is divided into what are called “quadrats” and then every tree or stem within each quadrat is measured and tagged. The database and user interface will then store these numeric measurements of each tree and stem along with the taxonomy history and location. The information stored in the database can then be used by scientists to study how various tree species grow in nature, seed disbursement, animal behavior, and the impact of greenhouse gases, among other things.

Dr. Steven Dolins, associate professor of computer science and information systems at Bradley, acts as the project manager for the students involved in the project. It was, in fact, a conversation he had with his friend Dr. Rick Condit of the STRI that sparked the development of this project. Dolins suggested his students design a database that would assist Dr. Condit in his work conducting tree censuses in Panama to study growth patterns and longevity of species in the rainforest.

Dr. Rick Condit

Dr. Rick Condit of the Simthsonian Tropical Research Institute traveled to Bradley to meet with students to discuss his database needs.

In 2005, graduate students enrolled in the Database Management Systems course at Bradley built a database that would store the diameter of trees and a count of species in a particular part of the forest. After further discussions with Dr. Condit, it was decided that undergraduate students enrolled in the Capstone Project for the 2006-2007 school year would modify the database to include the ability to store a history of the taxonomy of each tree and additional reporting tools. Computer science and information systems students Brooke Barnabe, Gabrielle Olivera, Anthony Osafo, Andrew Sablan, and Tyler Tippett are responsible for all aspects of the database project, from interviewing the clients, Dr. Condit and Suzanne Lao, STRI’s data manager, to building the user interface and reports. “[Dr. Condit] wanted to keep track of not only what the tree is named now, but also what the tree had been named,” said Tippett. Storing a history of all species changes and mapping valid species to invalid species “was the most complicated part of the database.”

Aside from the opportunity to travel to another country and experience a different culture, the students’ trip to Panama gave them a chance to meet face-to-face with the data manager, visit the rainforest where the data is collected, and gain familiarity in dealing with clients. “When you’re working with people that aren’t in the computer science world, they don’t have that background information and when they have a problem, you can’t just say ‘you need to implement an array and throw it in the database and it will all be fine,’” said Tippett. “They don’t necessarily understand that. You have to…figure out what exactly they need, build something for them, show them what you’ve got, and see if that will work for them.”

The students’ trip to Panama was made possible by a Special Emphasis grant from the Office of Teaching Excellence & Faculty Development. Special Emphasis grants support student-faculty engagement activities in which students make a significant intellectual contribution to the project and gain positive intellectual growth as a result of the engagement.

Other universities around the country are also working with STRI, using databases that collect various parts of the tree census data. “Other universities…are working [on databases] in the forest. It seems like each database has its own idiosyncrasies,” said Dr. Dolins. “I think everybody was impressed with our work and one of the outcomes of this meeting [in Panama] is that we will try to come up with an integrated model for all these different databases.”