Max Gotts ’24

Major

Undeclared

Project Title

Impact of Grazing Regimes on Rangeland Quality and Wildlife and Livestock Use

Presentation Link

View Max's Presentation

Certificate(s): Linguistics, Planets and Life

Our research related to the Mpala Research Centre in Kenya sought to integrate wildlife biodiversity and cattle farming. We were particularly interested in finding a way for grazing cattle that is minimally detrimental, or even positively mutualistic. To do so, we used vegetative transect data, herd observations, satellite imagery, machine learning models, the software Wildbook, the geographical software QGIS, programming in R, and a multitude of research figures. Our immediate goal for much of the project was to gain an understanding of the drivers of zebra movement, and to help herders move cattle to where we expected there to be the best terrain with respect to vegetative quality and proximity to zebras.



Internship Year

2021

Project Category

Biodiversity and Conservation

Organization(s)

Rubenstein Research Group, Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, Princeton University; Mpala Research Centre

Mentor(s)

Daniel Rubenstein, Class of 1877 Professor of Zoology, Professor of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology