[Seminar Blog] The string that holds it together: Ecoinformatics

written by: Ebony Michelle Argaez
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​Big data is the fuel of the 21st century, it is a part of our everyday lives; we produce and consume it. One example is the use of various types of data acquired from social media apps that are then used to deliver ads to targeted audiences. Yet, big data is also used in academia, health, science, and government for addressing research questions.
 
What is big data? Big data can be measured by its volume, variety, and velocity. Big data contains high volume in the form of many individual observations. Variety refers to many attributes associated with these observations. Velocity is the repetition of that volume and variety across some other dimension (e.g., time or populations). When preexisting big data sets are used in ecological studies, it is called ecoinformatics [1]. Dr. Michael Crossley, an Assistant Professor and Agricultural Entomologist in the Department of Entomology and Wildlife Ecology at the University of Delaware, uses ecoinformatics to understand how insect ecology is affected by changes in agricultural landscapes. 

How does the landscape influence the spread of an insect? Dr. Crossley addressed this question by looking at the spread of the Colorado potato beetle (CBP, Leptinotarsa decemlineata). He used the USDA Census of Agriculture data from 1840-2017. The CPB is a major pest of potato in North America, Europe and Asia. These data show that CBP was first discovered in 1811 and the first recorded outbreak in potato occurred in 1859. By 1870, outbreaks were recorded from much of the eastern U.S., by 1920 CPB had moved to Southern U.S. and into Canada and in 1930 had taken root in Idaho. Dr. Crossley was able to look at how the beetle spread as agricultural land use was changing. Due to the wealth of answers found in this dataset, Dr. Crossley started looking at other crops and mapped their distribution to find how agricultural industrialization in the U.S. impacted crop diversity (Figure 1). 

​What is the risk of economic damage caused by a pest? The peanut burrower bug (PBB, Pangaeus bilineatus, Figure 2A) feeds directly on peanut seeds, decreasing the quality and value of the peanut and causing serious economic damage to farmers in the southern U.S. Currently it is difficult to assess the risk that these bugs will cause economic crop losses in a given situation. Dr. Crossley is working with a team of University of Georgia researchers led by Dr. Mark Abney and Ben Aigner to determine whether economic damage could be predicted based on agricultural environmental factors using Federal Inspection records of PBB damage from 2016-2018. The team developed a risk-modeling workflow to determine PBB injury by predicting hotspots of damage (Figure 2B). This was done by georeferencing co-variates, such as the composition and configuration of the landscape surrounding each damaged field and identified a suite of predictive factors ranging from precipitation to configuration of peanut fields and seminatural habitat.

How does climate change affect insect populations? Monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) recently entered the IUCN Red List as Endangered [2]. They overwinter in Mexico and migrate north during the spring. Dr. Crossley and collaborators used a long-term data set from the North American Butterfly Association that were collected by volunteers who monitored butterflies at sites distributed across the US and Canada during the summer. Dr. Crossley wanted to examine spatial patterns of monarch population change, as well as spatial variation in drivers of monarch butterfly declines. They found that the abundance of butterflies across years increased, decreased, or remained relatively stable depending on location. This variation could be explained in part by contrasting negative effects of the herbicide glyphosate and positive effects of average temperature primarily in the core breeding range of the US Midwest.
 
Using ecoinformatic approaches, Dr. Crossley was able to address a diverse array of research questions in agricultural entomology from understanding pest outbreaks, to determining economic pest injury, and finally elucidating the drivers affecting insect populations. To learn more about Dr. Crossley’s work, visit his lab website.
 
References:
[1] Rosenheim, J. A., & Gratton, C. “Ecoinformatics (Big Data) for Agricultural Entomology: Pitfalls, Progress, and Promise.” Annual Review of Entomology, vol. 62, no. 1, Jan. 2017, pp. 399–417. https://doi.org/10.1146/annurev-ento-031616-035444.
 
[2] “Migratory Monarch Butterfly Now Endangered – IUCN Red List.” IUCN,
https://www.iucn.org/press-release/202207/migratory-monarch-butterfly-now-endangered-iucn-red-list
 
Author:
Ebony Michelle Argaez is a MS student in the Pick Lab studying the effectiveness of RNAi in the milkweed bug, Oncopeltus fasciatus. Twitter: @em_argaez