Blog 7: Goodbye!

Hello readers! Unfortunately, this will be my final blog post for my senior project. It’s been an incredible experience, and I appreciate you guys for tuning in and following me on my research journey. For this final blog, I’d like to share an update on the current state of my research and provide a rough outline of where the project will take me in the coming months.

As I mentioned in my last post, my project’s recent focus has been on the development of a pre-LDA algorithm. The objective of which would be to prepare data for Linear Discriminant Analysis. Although this goal has not been achieved yet, Stephanie and I have been working on developing our pre-LDA algorithm and improving my existing LDA. I hope that in the next few weeks, I will be able to transition from training my LDA algorithm on the limited NEW52 dataset to the expanded one that Kate, Alondra, and Dr. Fine created. 

With a successful pre-LDA algorithm, I will be able to quickly parse and prepare reflectance data for my LDA, which will improve both the effectiveness of my LDA and the speed with which my algorithm can be trained. While I cannot predict what will occur when I transition my algorithm from the training stage to the application stage on the new dataset, I am confident that the fixes required at such a late stage of algorithm development will be minimal. 

My goal is to, by the end of my internship in July, have a working identification tool that will use spectral data and LDA to classify protium (Burseraceae) specimens with sufficient accuracy. But looking beyond July, there’s potential for future researchers to refine my model and integrate larger datasets with more complex analysis to expand my project to more species and even other genera. 

I am excited to continue working on my research and to see how it will evolve and grow as it gets adopted by other ecologists. Although this is my final blog post, I hope that one day you will see an application of my research outside of this blog and senior project. But until then, thank you all so much for reading–Goodbye!