Poster Guidelines and Rubric

See this file for detailed instructions for the poster project as well as the grading rubric for the final poster:[insert file link]

HELPFUL REFERENCES

  • Chao A, RL Chazdon, RK Colwell, and TJ Shen. 2005. A new statistical approach for assessing similarity of species composition with incidence and abundance data. Ecology Letters. 8:148-159.  The diversity analysis used in this paper was created by Colwell and is available here: viceroy.eeb.uconn.edu/EstimateS/
  • Knapp S and R Wittig. 2012. An analysis of temporal homogenization and differentiation in Central European village floras. Basic and Applied Ecology. 13:319-327.
  • Gotelli NJ and RK Colwell. 2001. Quantifying biodiversity: procedures and pitfalls in the measurement and comparison of species richness. Ecology Letters. 4:379-391.
  • Clemants and Moore. 2005. The changing flora of the New York Metropolitan region. Urban Habitats. 3(1):1541-7115. (This is just an example of how people use herbarium specimens to think about urban biodiversity).

POSSIBLE DATA RESOURCES BESIDES iNATURALIST

Open data sets on the Science Forward OER, including USDA, eBird, etc.: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/science-forward/open-data-sets/

NYC Open data: https://opendata.cityofnewyork.us/

Natural Areas Conservancy (NYC Parks) Natural Areas Map: https://naturalareasnyc.org/map

Vital Parks Explorer – an interactive map with quick stats for NYC’s Community Districts.

Old BioBlitz Data: https://eportfolios.macaulay.cuny.edu/bioblitz/category/data/

Not a data set, but something to think about when it comes to using the iNat data – Discussion of Bias in the iNat database (note this is a user forum, not a peer reviewed source). Here is a peer reviewed study on iNat observers: https://academic.oup.com/bioscience/article/71/11/1179/6357804?login=false

Poster Design Help

Program: You need to make your poster in a program that you can all edit together. I strongly encourage you to use PowerPoint (and Office 365) so you can jointly edit. You could do this also in Google Slides, but I’ve found that more difficult to work with. Please do not use Canva because it is very difficult for me to give you clear feedback on those files. If you like Canva’s nicer design options, you could make yourself an appropriately-sized image file there and use it as a background of your poster slide in PowerPoint.

Templates:  You are free to use templates or design your own poster. If you use a template, you are responsible for editing it so it follows our assignment guidelines! Most will need some adjustment so they are appropriate for our assignment.

  • Make Signs (remember these often have too much text)
  • Colin Purrington (these are better, but need more detail if you want them to be “fancy”)
  • There are lots of others, so feel free to look around.

Sections to Include: 

  • Title and Names at the top
  • Introduction
  • Question/Hypothesis (required somewhere on the poster, but it doesn’t have to be its own section)
  • Methods
  • Results (mostly data visualizations with captions, should take up a lot of the poster)
  • Conclusions
  • Future Work
  • Works Cited
  • Acknowledgements (optional)

DO NOT Include: Abstracts, titles on figures, QR codes directing viewers to ANY of the required parts of the poser, URLs for Works Cited (unless it’s web-exclusive), extraneous text