Submission Date

8-29-2026

Document Type

Paper- Restricted to Campus Access

Department

Computer Science

Faculty Mentor

Leslie New

Comments

Presented during the 28th Annual Summer Fellows Symposium, July 24, 2026 at Ursinus College.

Project Description

In my research project, I managed data, created visualizations, and performed statistical analysis in collaboration with Dr. Denise Finney’s lab to answer whether or not cover cropping is beneficial to soil health. Cover crops are plants grown between main crop cycles to maintain soil health and fertility. Unlike crops that are harvested for profit, cover crops serve to protect the soil from drying out during extreme conditions, improve structure, and enhance nutrient content.

Using the integrated development environment RStudio and its programming language R, I downloaded various packages such as tidyverse, ggplot2, dplyr, and janitor, which is similar to tidyverse, for organizing and combining data. I also used an important package called “here” that allowed me to import and open data files. These files contained soil data collected by Dr. Finney’s lab in 2025 from various corn farms, along with additional soil data from Cornell University. I specifically used Dr. Finney’s lab data on carbon and nitrogen cycling, the timelines and usage of cover cropping, and then Cornell University’s soil data that had various components on aggregate stability, organic matter, soil texture, and the percentage amounts of each texture in the overall soil makeup. After importing all this data into RStudio using the various packages, I was able to merge the datasets—Nitrogen Cycling, Carbon Cycling, and Cornell University’s data—based on samples of soil collected by Dr. Finney’s lab. I then created various visualizations as requested, such as a boxplot that illustrates Cover Crop Category vs. Potentially Mineralizable Nitrogen, and a scatterplot that illustrates Amino Nitrogen vs. Years of Cover Cropping.

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