Florida Plants and Climate Change -
CURE Class

Course-Based Undergraduate Research Experiences (CURE) courses are participation in a research project in a classroom setting. Each student selected two plant species that are typical of Florida Hardwood Forests and used code in R to predict their current and future habitat suitability. 

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For each species, occurrence data was pulled and cleaned to analyze current distributions and important climatic and soil variables. These variables were then analyzed to determine the most important factors to the species and model the current habitat suitability. Then, future climate change scenarios of varying severity were used to predict the future suitability in Hardwood Forests as well as across the United States. 

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Through this experience, I gained:

• exposure to scientific environments and processes

• experience coding in R to clean data, perform statistical tests, and create models and maps

• practice writing scientific papers through a draft manuscript

• presentation experience at the Spring 2024 Undergraduate Research Symposium.