Title: STOICH: a new database describing the carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus content in lake, river, and wetland ecosystems, and a project exploring new ways to visualize data.

Abstract: The vision of the STOICH project is to solve current and emerging challenges in ecological and environmental science and to create a more just and inclusive culture for scientific advancements. To achieve this vision, project members worked in tandem collecting and consolidating >100 data sources to build a database with >30,000 data points of carbon and nutrient content of aquatic plants, animals, and microbes, while also exploring new tools to address analytical and institutional challenges related to data science and visualization. In this talk, I will present several ways in which we met these challenges. First, I will introduce the complications in ecology related to analyzing ratio data and the best practices we developed. Next, I will present the results of a collaboration in which we intentionally infused a humanities perspective into our data visualization development. And, finally, I will present outputs from an artist-scientist collaboration to explore data concepts.

About the Speaker: Jessica Corman is a Limnologist/Aquatic Ecologist at the School of Natural Resources at the University of Nebraska Lincoln. Dr. Corman received her PhD in Biology at Arizona State University and a B.S. in Biological Sciences and a B.S. in Science of Earth Systems at Cornell University. She studies nature through the lens of chemistry, researching how elements move through ecosystems and their implications on the ecosystem’s structure and function. In her research, she combines techniques from bio-geo chemistry and ecosystem ecology to understand processes that influence elemental flows into and through out ecosystems, especially those that are particularly vulnerable to nutrient pollution such as lakes and streams.