Rong Li presents poster at the Schmidt Science Summit

Rong Li presents a poster on neighborhood and species interaction effects on tropical tree growth at the 2026 Schmidt Science Summit.

Rong Li, a Schmidt AI4Science postdoctoral fellow at the Cornell University AI for Science Institute, presented a poster titled “Quantifying Neighborhood and Species Interaction Effects on Tropical Tree Growth with Machine Learning and Long-term Census Data” at the 2026 Interdisciplinary Science Summit in North Carolina. The work, co-authored with lab alumni Dylan Van Bramer and Xiangtao Xu, uses XGBoost and graph neural network (GNN) models on long-term census data from the Luquillo Forest Dynamics Plot in Puerto Rico to quantify how neighboring trees and species interactions shape individual tree growth.