Alicia Nguyen '23

Alicia Nguyen '23: Research with Lisa Greer, Summer 2021

Summer 2020, I was fortunate to be a part of Professor Greer's research team working remotely from my hometown in Hanoi, Vietnam. Our summer research portion was both a continuation and an extension of an on-going research project of Professor Greer to monitor whether Coral Gardens at Belize remains a refugium for A. Cervicornis in the face of the changing global climate.

The first few weeks in June, I, along with two other undergraduate students, learnt how to use a diverse set of applications from Adobe Illustrator to Excel to Matlab to quantify the percentage of living Acropora Cervicornis cover over time at Coral Gardens. The majority of our work revolves around hand-tracing the live corals on each picture of the quadrats in Belize. It sounded like a straight-forward task but it required us to learn to pay attention to the smallest detail to guarantee data accuracy and to be more pro-active in our judgement, determining whether the type of corals we are tracing is the correct Acropora Cervicornis species and whether they are live corals. Through this first few weeks, we also learned about how to minimize data loss and inaccuracy in scientific research. To protect against data loss, our team established a solid framework of organizing and backing up data every step of the way. Then, we got to the most crucial part for data accuracy: the peer review processes. Although we are allowed to use our own judgement in the coral tracing work, to ensure the data is not vulnerable to human error, our tracing work is always checked by our mentor and one of the two other peers. During the next week and a half, I continued to work remotely on coral tracing with my mentor while my teammates were off to Belize to gather data first-hand. In this time, I also worked with my mentor to improve my literature review skills, especially learning how to understand the statistics, the visual representations of data and the method sections in most fundamental geology papers on coral conservation.

Our second part of the research project began after the trip back from Belize. We continued tracing coral data from 2021 instead of 2020 as we did in the first few weeks. We then summarize the data using Matlab and visualize the findings on Excel. Then it was time for our new portion of the research - photogrammetry. With more than 100 photos of individual coral colonies taken in Belize, we attempted to create 3D models to gather data on the volume of habitable spaces within each type of colonies and to compare the 3D live coral coverage with the 2D data through tracing. This part was the most exciting and challenging for us because the guidelines for how to use the computer applications had not been made, let alone finalized. We had multiple meetings every week to work with the technicians in the IQ Center to develop from scratch new methods to quantify the data. It took in total four attempts with four entirely different approaches using entirely new computer applications to finally make the models and quantify the data on habitable spaces. It was through this process of working with professor Greer and the IQ center specialists that I learnt how detailed and creative researchers have to be in making a study design and choosing the appropriate method. This was my first exposure to the authentic scientific research and it inspired me to continue on with this academic path I have chosen in Environmental Geology with a focus on Climate Change.