Biology Major Wins Award for Sustainable River Research
Seidel credited fellow USD students who attended the conference.
“I was not the only student from [USD] to attend this conference,” Seidel said. “Students shared transformative research concepts across disciplines and represented the University of South Dakota very well. I am thankful for the opportunity to be at the same conference as them.”
Seidel’s poster was titled “Effects of fishes on aquatic insects in linked aquatic-terrestrial food webs,” and was co-authored by assistant professor of biology, Jeff Wesner.
“This kind of research involves a lot of tedium to maintain traps, drive to the site every few days, preserve insects, sort thousands of bugs from muck,” said Wesner. “Tyler excelled because he embraced that process...Making those kinds of conceptual links between the bugs on your tray and Figure 2 in paper X are not easy to do, especially for early career students. I was lucky to have Tyler on this project, and because of his work, we will publish his findings in a good journal.”
Seidel competed against presenters in all STEM disciplines, including students from MIT, Brown, and University of California at Berkeley. His research was completed in the summer of 2017 with funding from USD’s National Science Foundation Research Experience for Undergraduate students program: Sustainable RIVER (Remediating InVasives to Encourage Resilience).
