Fall 2022 Team Collaboration Award Winner - IBM: Impact of Climate Change on Mangrove Forests

Student researchers: Catherine Wang, Grant Wagner, Isha Arora, Lori Khashaki, Michelle Cheung, Srihita Kariveda

The Team Collaboration Award recognizes a team that has persevered and overcome data science related challenges within their project and succeeded in creating and building a strong scaffolding with a promising project outcome that will make a meaningful impact. This award takes into consideration the challenges associated with all data related project cycles and emphasizes the importance of a team coming together, prioritizing collaboration, and combining efforts to define and overcome challenges regarding their project.

The Impact of Climate Change on Mangrove Forests team worked in collaboration with IBM to determine geographic similarities and differences that may change mitigation strategies in relation to climate change. Weather trends were monitored to analyze whether there was commonality between regions and their climate. The team reached the conclusion that mangrove area loss is due to human settlement and that the lost area is most commonly converted to wet soil and mud flats. 

As Mangrove trees are critical for mitigating many detrimental effects of climate change on coastal areas, this analysis has an immense impact on understanding how the loss of Mangrove forests due to climate change affects coastal ecosystems. 

The student researchers faced many challenges, particularly when combining multiple datasets into one. As the team handled multiple real world sources, the way in which information was presented varied greatly. The large size of these datasets also served as an issue, and the breadth of the data meant further complications with cloud computing using Azure. The data cleaning involved in this project was immensely time consuming but the researchers persevered and overcame these challenges as a team to reach their conclusions, earning them the Team Collaboration Award.

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