Ray Grossman, 2015, Mathematics
I spent most of my summer working with unmanned aerial vehicles (UAVs) and studying their possible applications for ecology. First, I assisted with a project that used a UAV to take aerial photos of a cranberry bog, and stitched the photos together using software. Later, we hope to calculate the normalized difference vegetation index (NDVI) of the photos, which is essentially a measure of the amount of chlorophyll in various plots, representative of their overall health. Additionally, I worked on a literature review that looked at current studies in ecology and identified their spatial and temporal scope, to identify possible gaps in collected ecological data. Finally, I spent some time learning how to pilot a UAV, so I could continue the project over the school year when one of the graduate students had left.