- 02November 2, 2020
Seminar: Jason McLachlan
Improving ecosystem understanding with long-term data and models.Ecological forecasts, probabilistic predictions about the state of ecosystems made jointly from data and models, are a gold standard for scientific understanding and for management decisions. Most forecasts are made on short timeframes (< 10 years), which is convenient because that is the time frame at which most management decisions are made and most ecosystem data cover. However, important ecosystem changes happen at long time scales as well. For instance, the impact of current climate change on terrestrial carbon pools will persist for centuries. Since good short term forecasts can lead to bad long term predictions, it’s essential that we start integrating data on slow ecological processes into ecosystem forecasts, with the long term in mind. I’ll present results from the PalEON project, showing: (1) how to assimilate data spanning decades to millennia into ecosystem models; (2) results from this work that show the surprising processes that shape long term changes in ecosystems; and (3) the challenges of forecasting tipping points and ecological collapse.
- 09November 9, 2020
Seminar: Abigail Swann
Quantifying the role that terrestrial ecosystems play in Earth’s climateBiologists have widely documented how the local environment influences plants. Recent findings suggest, surprisingly, that the reverse is also true: plant distribution and functioning control the local energy balance at Earth’s surface and directly modify regional and global scale climate. In this talk I will discuss how plants modify the climate system and its response to external forcing. We will investigate the sensitivity of the atmosphere to changes in plant cover, in particular the location of plant cover change. We will also explore the role that plant responses to a changing climate can further modify climate. Taken together, these findings demonstrate that ecosystems and climate must be considered together as a coupled system, particularly when assessing the response of the climate system to change. - 16November 16, 2020
Seminar: Maria Uriarte
The impacts of Hurricane Maria on Puerto Rican forests: Is this the new normal?
Cyclonic storms represent the dominant natural disturbance in coastal regions across much of the tropics. Projected increases in cyclonic storm rainfall and wind speeds under a warming climate will have profound effects on these ecosystem, with implications for forest composition and structure of these and cascading ecosystem services. In this talk, I will combine remotely-sensed and field plot data to evaluate the risk factors determining spatial variation in the magnitude of damage Hurricane María inflicted on Puerto Rican forests and to estimate total aboveground biomass lost to this storm. I will then compare the impacts of H. Hugo, category 3 storm that struck the island in 1989 with those of H. Maria on a 16-ha forest plot that has been the subject of long term study. I will also evaluate long-term legacies of previous hurricanes on canopy structure and forest composition. Finally, I will rely on an ecosystem model to explore the effects of a changing storm regime on the carbon dynamics of these forests.
- 18November 18, 2020
Ecoinformatics Ignite Session
Please join us as our students present 5-minute lightning talks about their derived data products using data from NEON, USA-NPN, PhenoCam, FLUXNET, NASA EOS, USGS NWIS, and more. You can find the schedule here. For Zoom information, please contact Katharyn Duffy.
- 23November 23, 2020
Seminar: Lizzie Wolkovich
How a 90 minute fake data simulation solved a puzzle my lab had spent
3,000+ hours onOver the last five years, a growing number of studies have documented
dampened shifts in tree leafout with continued warming. These findings
supported experimental studies that showed shifting cues for plants as
temperatures rise, and suggested climate change has already reshaped
fundamental biological processes. Over the same time, my lab launched a
major meta-analysis of all published growth chamber studies of tree
leafout—scraping 16,000 rows of data spanning 60 years of research,
spending at least 3,000 person hours on data cleaning, scrubbing, and
analysis using Bayesian hierarchical models—to try to understand these
shifts. Here I’ll review how we tackled the meta-analyses, what we
learned from it about fundamental plant responses to temperature and
daylength in experiments and in natural conditions across Europe.After all our work, we found ourselves no closer to understanding
dampening effects of spring temperatures with warming. But a 90 minute
data simulation I did on a train to Seattle one morning suggests a
simple answer to this puzzle, that could affect many studies of
temperature responses with climate change.