Dalhousie University

Coastal resources are essential for their ability to provide ecosystem services valued by society including food, shoreline protection, flood control, recreation, and water purification (Costanza et al. 1997). This research project seeks to utilize mathematical and statistical techniques to predict the distribution of essential marine habitat and aid in its conservation. The research team is attempting to represent living biomass and associated ecosystems via quantitative descriptions of the physical and geological variables perceived to shape their habitat space.

 
About twenty-five years ago a spelunker was lost in a Pennsylvania cave system. A mathematician at Pennsylvania State University was asked to help design an efficient search of the cave system. This mathematician happened to be a graph theorist and as a cave system may be modelled as a graph, it led him to introduce the general problem of searching graphs.

The development of the Internet and the World Wide Web has changed the way in which we gather information. No longer is information only available as in a library, with items catalogued in an orderly manner. More and more often, information is presented as it is in the World Wide Web: as a mass of items with interconnecting links. This research team aims to extract information from such web-like collections by considering both the content of the items and the link structure that connects them, and the interaction of both components.