I can supervise undergraduate and Masters by coursework student research projects under programmes by the Department of Biological Sciences at the National University of Singapore. The majority of research opportunities with me will be tied to my work coordinating NParks’ Tropical Forest Ecology Research programme, and especially contributing to the anchor projects on the programme, such as the Long Term Forest Ecological Monitoring (LTFEM) project (see Er et al. (2023)).
Prospective students must be interested in the projects on offer and be willing to work very hard. I offer projects with research questions that I think are meaningful enough to have a chance at publication in a scientific journal, but this is only possible if data quality is sufficiently high, which very much depends on the student carrying out the study. On my part, a lot of time and effort goes into working with the student to develop a robust study design and coaching on how to make sense of data and communicate the work; on the part of the student, the data collection must be meticulous and the sample size must be sufficient. In return, the student will witness (the pains of) science-in-action at first hand and may eventually have the satisfaction of seeing his or her results published (see my track record).
I also require the student to be receptive to criticism.
Feel free to approach any of my former students to find out what to expect from me. If you think you might be able to take it and possess the requisites, please get in touch to arrange a face-to-face chat. However, meeting up does not mean acceptance.
Terrestrial LiDAR scanning (TLS) is increasingly being used to characterise forest structure and quantify aboveground biomass. Tree architecture can also be studied through the segmentation of individual trees from TLS point clouds. This project aims to apply techniques to segment trees from TLS data collected in plots under NParks’ Tropical Forest Ecology Research programme. Example research questions include the comparison of tree architecture with increasing size or between native and exotic tree species.
This project is suitable for one of the following: a. Final Year Project under the Life Sciences major (i.e., LSM4288E). b. Honours Thesis under the Geography major (i.e., GE4401). c. Masters in Biodiversity Conservation and Sustainability Research Project (i.e., BL5199).
Options (a) and (c) will be supervised by me and co-supervised by Dr Hao Tang from the Department of Geography, while option (b) will be supervised by Dr Hao Tang and co-supervised by me.