CESTA Seminar | Gordon & Steiner "Visualizing long-term changes in spatial ecology"

We will discuss the results of our ongoing collaboration on four spatio-temporal research projects, all of which use visualization and mapping to elucidate long-term changes in spatial ecology.

1) A 30-year field study of a population of harvester ant colonies in the southwest US desert. Our current research examines the evolution of colony “territories” and the spatial effects of neighbors on the founding and survival of colonies.

2) A 25-year survey of the distribution of the invasive Argentine ant in Stanford’s Jasper Ridge Biological Preserve. Mapping changes in the distribution of the ants shows how the Argentine ant population is supported by water from nearby gardens and houses at the edge of the Preserve, and how a native ant species has been able to resist the invasive Argentine ant during times of drought.

3) A 5-year survey of the spatial distribution of fungal spores on the Stanford campus, made as part of Gordon’s "Ecology for Everyone" course. Students sample fungal spores from the air in their dorm rooms, and we examine how species richness and abundance varies among buildings and across seasons.

4) A digital storytelling platform, LandTalk (www.landtalk.org), collates student-led interviews of older persons who have been long-term observers of landscape change. This is a new environmental humanities project that will provide maps of changing landscapes and attitudes about those changes, and can be used as an educational tool both in schools and universities.

Deborah M. Gordon is a Professor in the Department of Biology at Stanford University. She studies how ant colonies work without central control using networks of simple interactions, how these networks function ecologically and evolve in relation to changing environments. She received her PhD from Duke University, then joined the Harvard Society of Fellows, and did postdoctoral research at Oxford and the University of London. Awards include a Guggenheim Fellowship and the Gores Teaching Award from Stanford. She is the author of two books, Ant Encounters (Primers in Complex Systems, Princeton Univ Press) and Ants at Work (Norton) (http://www.stanford.edu/~dmgordon/).

Erik Steiner is the Co-Director of the Spatial History Project at CESTA. He co-founded the Lab in 2007 and served as the first Lab Director until 2010. Erik is a geographer, cartographer, interaction designer, data wrangler, and programmer - and has co-authored dozens of digital and print artifacts with others at CESTA with a focus on visualizing spatio-temporal data.