Nicole's Project Page

Who:  I am from Orange County, California and came to the U for the hiking, skiing, and great opportunities such as ACCESS. In my spare time, I love to run and play my guitar!

My scientific interests:  I have always enjoyed math because I love the satisfaction of problem solving. I want to continue to find and learn new ways to use math to analyze our world.

Academic goals:  I am an applied math major with a minor in computer science. I hope to continue to use math to model nature, analyze the effects of climate change through the Arctic, study changes in polar bear energetics, and remain in my ACCESS lab.

Career goals:  I hope to use the skills learned during my time here, apply them to real world problems, and find solutions to these big questions.

Polar bears are threatened by climate change, including the precipitous rate at which Arctic sea ice is melting, affecting their habitat. This results in shortened hunting seasons on the ice, thus reducing the consumption of prey. The ice they hunt on is also typically more broken up, leaving polar bears with more difficult terrain to travel through in order to consume their regular source of energy: seals. These changes may cause polar bears to spend more time traveling through water, during which they expend more energy than walking on ice. The combination of shorter hunting seasons and increased time in water may result in energy deficits. The optimal movement of polar bears may be crucial to their survival because the decisions they make determine the paths they take, thus impacting their energy levels. By modeling polar bear movement on a square grid representing patches of ice and water, we found that the optimal movement of a polar bear depends on the ice to water ratio, and the mixture geometry of the water and ice phases. On the small scale, in a four-by-four grid, there were sixteen viable pathways for the polar bear to take. We are currently working to develop an algorithm that will find the optimal path on a grid of any size and for any configuration of the ice and water phases. In the future, we will also consider polar bear movement on fractal icescapes, and incorporate optimal decision making based on foraging for food. By studying energy costs in these different environments, we will better understand polar bear energetics under these new environmental conditions.

Nicole Forrester Research Poster.pdf Download Nicole Forrester Research Poster.pdf