Seed Grant Program

Two faculty members at Mississippi State have been awarded a seed grant by the Mississippi Computational Biology Consortium (MCBC).  The MCSN is funded by a grant from the Experimental Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR) of the National Science Foundation (NSF). The MCBC aims to stimulate competitive research that combines computation and biology by facilitating innovative collaborations among life scientists and computer scientists within institutions and across institutions in the State of Mississippi. 

Gary Erwin from Biological Sciences and Seth Oppenheimer from Mathematics and Statistics have been awarded funding for their proposal entitled “Dynamic Spatio-Temporal Modeling of plant invasion”.

Abstract

This project aims to use detailed data on the distribution of an invasive plant species, along with ecoinformatics and dynamic modeling approaches to model the invasion process. Insight gained here could be applied to other species to better understand the general biology of invasion or to assist in the management of economically important exotic species. Our approach will be to first quantify relationships between the target species and landscape-scale environmental variables (including factors such as soils, climate, and land use patterns), then to build and test models that simulate the spread of this species across actual and hypothetical landscapes. The role of landscape features in influencing the spatial distribution of the target species will be evaluated through a combination of ecological informatics approaches, including the use of geographic information systems (GIS) and statistical modeling (logistic regression, multivariate ecological analyses, etc.). The resulting mathematical models of interactions between the plant and its environment will incorporated into a temporal modeling framework that follows population expansion via a two-dimensional (spatial) differential equations or difference equations approach. The resultant models should yield important insight into relative roles of diverse environmental factors on the distribution and possible range expansion of invasive plant species.