Melissa Starking
Ph.D. Candidate
Department of Fisheries and Wildlife
Michigan State University
Previous Research Projects
Perceptions of Living Downtown:
During my internship experience for the GIS certificate I worked on research involving survey data exploring attitudes towards living downtown Flint. After using a series of exploratory data analysis techniques, I created hot spot maps which show the spatial relationship to whether or not survey respondents would agree or disagree that these improvements would attract them to living downtown.
Spatiotemporal Analysis of Human Emotion and Travel Mode:
This research involves looking at relationships within space and time between human happiness and their travel mode. The use of twitter data can be used to explore human sentiment while the tweets geospatial aspect can be used to look at movement. Chicago and Washington DC are the pilot cities used in this research.
My work with sea lamprey involved assisting with a model and running simulations to look at pheromone-baited trapping. This method was tested on 14 streams in Lake Michigan using the model and compared to current methods. This results suggests that a strategy which incorporates 3kPZS-baited trapping into the Lake Michigan sea lamprey control program could be a cost-effective alternative.