Welcome to Cathy Yao's Mission 2006, Team 3-Flora Website:0)
INTRODUCTION:
Welcome to Cathy Yao's Mission 2006, Team 3-Flora Website:0)
I'm Cathy Yao, a member of MIT's Mission 2006. We're working together this year to try to formulate a plan to both monitor and preserve what remains of the diverse Amazon Rainforest. With a team of young minds with fresh thoughts, we hope to propose a viable strategy that we can help implement to save this wonderful resource by the end of the semester.
The semester has speedily come to a closebut I'm very proud and excited about how far we've come and the presentation and website we produced. Our final website can be found at http://web.mit.edu/12.000/www/m2006/final/. The final presentation is available here.
Thanks:0)
SOLUTIONS:
(click here for our solutions
to the mission!)
MINUTES:
(click
here for the minutes from our team meetings)
RESEARCH:
(click
here for my research)
UPDATES:
(weekly updates on our progress)
12/10/02
So, our presentation is done. Ahh?
:0) It went well:0) I really enjoyed the semester despite the moments of
chaos near the end. I'm very proud of what we've accomplished, though it
may not have been what I expected to in the beginning. We were thrown a
huge problem and I think we did a great job addressing it and putting together
the best of old projects concerning the Amazon as well as coming up with
our own original ideas and unique solutions.
As we discussed in class yesterday, the class wasn't
really so much about the Amazon rainforest but about learning how to approach
and deal with complex problems. We learned a lot about teamwork and how
to organize a large group and get things done. It's good to be put into
a situation where you're able to wrestle with problems that weren't written
for a textbook, that are from the real world. All in all, I had a great
time-research, team meetings, mad rush and all.
Investigative essay for Subject 21W.735: Reading and Writing the Essay
12/3/02
This past week has been pretty full
making final preparations for our website and presentation. Tonight I spent
many long hours with a bunch of other students in the Terrascope room editing
pages and filling spaces. Though we're coming right down to the deadline
and it feels like there's still a lot to do, I'm feeling pretty good about
our project. It's been good to work with a number of people in Mission
2006 that I haven't seen too much during the semester. Staying up late
into the night with this group is a lot of fun.
11/26/02
On Sunday, the Infrastructure group
(Juliana, Sarah, George, and I), got together to write up our solution.
It's been pretty tough since there wasn't much information on the subject
earlier but with what we have on the affects of roads and such on the rainforest
and our previous work with fragmentation, we've put together a viable solution.
Since in our new research on infrastructure we couldn't find too much documentation
infrastructure's effects, we instead have suggested a study to get more
concrete evidence and from there implement our plan for dealing with how
to improve the infrastructure so that it has a lesser negative impact.
11/19/02
Right now we are in a bit of a transition
period. Last week we chose to switch into new groups in order to prepare
our information for the final website and presentation. I am now in the
Infrastructure group and have also submitted the information from my earlier
research to the Logging group. We plan on meeting this weekend in order
to put together our solution for Infrastructure.
11/13/02
We've been sifting through our research
and trying to identify the papers that are most relevant to the solution
we'd like to create. For monitoring, we're gathering all the different
methods and figures associated with them to sort of synthesize and take
the best of each study and design our own. We've decided to use biomass,
litter fall traps, and epiphytes as our main flora monitoring methods.
11/5/02
Now that
we have the bulk of our research finished, we are planning on concentrating
more on the actual strategies to conserve the rainforest. As we develop
these, we will have to research more in order to fill in the gaps in our
current store of information. See the updates to my research page.
10/29/02
This week I have tried find more information
on better methods of logging and ways of conserving the nutrients in the
soil. Hopefully, we can create a more concrete method of logging which
will minimize the disruption of the natural rainforest ecosystem. See the
updates to my research page.
10/22/02
From now on, we have decided to move
onto the next stage of the process: monitoring and protecting. We have
split our team into two groups, each working on finding feasible strategies
to monitor and protect the rainforest, respectively. I am on the protecting
team and am doing research on what sorts of programs have been tried in
the past, their strengths and weaknesses, what kind of message we want
to send and how we can use the productive aspects of the plant life towards
saving them. We must analyze a baseline for the plants, what the threats
are doing to them, and how we can help them work with that.
I read a few papers concerning logging,
effects associated with it on the environment, and ways of improving conventional
logging practices. Information from those can be found on my research page.
10/15/02
This week I have done research on
"What is the rainforest?" specifically the biological portion.
See my work for this week on my RESEARCH
(click
here for my research) page.
10/8/02
For this week, we have set ourselves
a deadline for which to have the answers to the two questions we have been
focusing on. We hope to have compiled these into a more comprehensive team
website by the end of the week. We're each working on a different subtopic
in "What is rainforest" or "What are threats to the rainforest." These
include deforestation, natural disasters, human impact, chemical processes,
historical, and biotic factors.
10/1/02
This week in Flora we have divided
the group up into half characterizing and half analyzing the threats to
the plants of the rainforest. I have a focus on ecology. We've had a chance
to at least look through the course reserve books and are all getting a
better understanding of the way the rainforest works. I have checked out
a number of books and am in the process of reading up on more general and
specifically ecological topics. Through the interactions of the plants
in the different levels of the canopy, hopefully we can shed some light
on how that contributes to the rainforest as a whole and how that can help
us come up with some solutions.
9/24/02
As part of a team focused on monitoring
and preserving the flora of the rainforest, we have been gathering information
from all kinds of resources: books, journals, magazines, online, etc. From
this information we hope to first get an idea of just what sort of flora
there is in the rainforest, or at least general groupings as well as fungi
and algae. From there, we'd like to look more indepth at each kind of plant's
chemical processes and how it interacts with both the environment around
it and other species.
We've already decided to split into groups according to levels of the rainforest, i.e. canopy, understory, ground layer. And this week we are all searching through different types of resources to gain a better understand of what plant life in the rainforest is like.
REFERENCES:
(click
here for my references)
LINKS:
Contents of Cathy Yao's Page:
Introduction
Minutes
Research
Flora's Pages:
Main
Flora Page:
Team
3-FLora
Individual
Flora Team Member Pages:
Jean Marie
Downing
George Eng
Tanzeer Khan
Sarah Newman
Juliana Perez
Shan Riku
Cathy Yao
(You're here!)
Mission 2006's Pages:
Mission
2006 Main Website
CONTACT INFORMATION:
Cathy Yao
cyao@mit.edu
Team 3-FLora
rain3@mit.edu