About Me

Hello! My name is Mark Schulist and I am a senior (wow, that went fast!!!) in the MARC (Marin Academy Research Collaborative) program at Marin Academy. I love math, and more specifically, using math to understand the world. I also love to engineer solutions (often using math!) to all of the questions and problems that pop into my head. Some of my hobbies include playing tennis and birding. That latter of those leads me to my MARC project.

At the end of 6th grade, my science teacher (Bob Arigi) had us do a unit on birds. In order to get full credit during the unit, we had to find 30 different species of birds. Because I am me, it meant that I had to find at least 30 species. I quickly realized that this was a difficult task, especially if I did not go anywhere with a particularly high abundance of birds. Our teacher arranged a field trip to the local sanitary ponds that hosted a wide variety of species, from ducks to birds of prey. I remember being astonished by the vibrant red on the wings of a Red-winged Blackbird and focusing all of my attention to keep my eyes on the Marsh Wrens as they darted in and out of the reeds. This sparked my birding interest and brought me into the world of birding.

After about a year of birding, I knew more birds and I knew more people. A few of these people happened to be kids my age who were talking about doing the Christmas Bird Count at Abbott's Lagoon in Point Reyes. Of course, I wanted to do this. The leader of the count, Durrell Kapan, was a scientist at the Academy of Sciences. Another helping birder, Jack Dumbacher, was the Curator of Ornithology at the Academy of Sciences. After being with them from 5:00 AM to 6:00 PM counting birds, I learned so much. I learned about everything from how to identify new bird species to what they did at the Academy. One influential thing I learned was that there was a class at the Academy of Sciences called the "Master Birding Program" where 20 people were taught about birds for an entire year. The course consisted of one nighttime lecture and bird walk per month. There were also some "graduation" requirements that included 100 hours of community service (related to birds), taking a test, and writing a brief research paper. I completed all of this while I was in 7th and 8th grade. While trying to find activities to meet the volunteer hour requirements, Jack said that I could help annotate some recordings of birds that had been taken from a study he was working on. Annotating the recordings meant that I would listen through the recordings and then write down all of the birds that I heard. My involvement in this project would not end here.

The following summer (2019), Jack and Durrell invited me to come to visit the study site for a few nights with my dad. This was before the controlled burn had been conducted at the study site. I walked with Jack and conducted some point counts (count all of the birds at a specific point for 10 mins) and moved some ARUs (automated recording units). It was super cool to be able to see how science data was collected and how all of the information that we are fed is actually created and studied. For the next 2 summers, I would go up with my dad for a few nights to check out the study area, and I was even able to conduct point counts by myself during the summer of 2021. For my Junior year, I decided to apply to the MARC program with the hope of being able to continue and grow my involvement in this study.

Fast forward to today, where I am currently working with the scientists at the California Academy of Sciences (Jack Dumbacher and Durrell Kapan) on the same project studying birds and how they respond to fire. More specifically, I am using the audio data to determine how to best optimize the combination of acoustic and point count data. Most of the species (> 95%) on the point counts are detected just by sound, so I believe that the point counts are serving a redundant role due to the vastly greater amount of data that the ARUs are able to collect compared to the point counts.