Nervous day

July 14
Today, it’s the Project Proposal Presentation day. Basically, I’m quite nervous that I haven’t stand out to speak English. And during the proposal, I have to explain the thoughts and respond to the floor question. In addition, there were many professors with profession in soil and plants.

Even more, our group is not aim to perform experiment to prove a hypothesis. Our approach is to think of pilot ways or tools to facilitate the existing biological studies. The feasibility of the project is not determined before we do the testing. This made me very nervous…

Base on lacking internet access, it’s rather difficult to find the direction of project. It’s just because we may find papers and journals to obtain support and ideas of the project. But after the long discussion with my group mates, we have two proposed projects:

1. Visualization of the vegetation (AutoCAD)

Since the traditional research of the plant can only show number and species of plants with limited exact location of the vegetation. This brings us into deep thought to a new way to show the exactly location of the plants in the selected area. The outcome is to enhance the biological studies of plants with easier comparative research.

This project requires drafting software, AutoCAD, which is widely used by the engineers and architectures. This program can accurate note the location of the different types of vegetation in a specific area.

2. Distant identification of birds (Morphological ratio)

The normal bird survey in a area, it usually use the mist nest to capture the birds on a location for a fixed duration. The mist nest is usually placed in the flight route of the birds, and tied between two trees. When the bird bumps into the nest, they would be captured and wrapped by the nest. However, about 40% of birds captured may be injured or killed. We are now proposing a method for bird survey without catching birds.

This idea is come from the facial detection of human, especially for forensic propose. We can make use of the species difference in body parts ratio birds to recognize the species of birds at the distant, such as eyes to beak ratio of the birds. The method is to have the picture of the bird and use the data base to identify the birds by the morphological ratio.

After the whole discussion, we decided to go for the project 1 only. The reason is that we only have limited time and resources to complete this project only…