Achievement

The third cohort of LEAP students conducted a capstone project in which citizen scientists participated in pollinator (bee) collections throughout the Chicago area. The data collected during the summer of 2009 was used in the maximum entropy niche modeling program Maxent to create species distribution maps. Land cover data for the Chicago region were used as the explanatory variables, and rom this, Maxent creates distribution maps. Interestingly, the suitability distribution appears to roughly follow socioeconomic trends in the region. The next steps are field verification of the data and maps. LEAP fellow Clifford Shierk presented these findings at the US-IALE conference in April 2011.