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Google Earth Engine Skills Training – Part 2

This session will build on the first Google Earth Engine Skill Training workshop offered in September 2023. Follow this link to access the slides and example codes associated with the first session. It would be helpful to review the code examples from the first session. The second session will be more hands on – we’ll use several javascript code examples to develop skills related to compositing image collections, time series analysis, lidar visualization, and classification/regression. Please bring your laptop so you can follow along with the code examples. I’ll plan to stick around for about 30 minutes after the seminar in case there are follow-up questions.

Jessica Guo

Jessica Guo completed her PhD in Biological Sciences under the supervision of Dr. Kiona Ogle in 2019. In 2020, she became a data scientist at the University of Arizona, where she helps researchers develop workflows, analyses, and interactive data visualization. Jessica also develops short-format trainings to teach reproducible data science practices, including chairing a local data science festival in 2021. In her spare time, she continues researching plant water use strategies and is particularly interested in leveraging high-resolution time series derived from plant sensors.

Claire Karban

Dr. Claire Karban is a research ecologist postdoc at the USGS Southwest Biological Science Center. She is studying the ecological impacts of utility-scale solar energy development in the southwestern U.S. Prior to beginning at the USGS, she completed her PhD in dryland restoration ecology at CU Boulder in September 2022.

Kyle Rodman

Dr. Kyle Rodman received his Ph.D. in Geography from the University of Colorado Boulder in 2019, then completed a postdoc at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in the Department of Forest and Wildlife Ecology. Kyle has been a Research Scientist at the Ecological Restoration Institute at NAU since 2021, where he does research in forest ecology and management across the western US. In his free time, Kyle likes to explore desert canyons in the Southwest.

Katharyn Duffy

Dr. Katharyn Duffy works at the intersection of forestry, wildfire, and EcoInformatics – ecology and ‘big data’. She co-authored the first wildfire-focused forest carbon methodology, and continues to innovate data-driven methods to support natural climate solutions. Katharyn’s focus at Vibrant Planet includes building data and interfaces to support monitoring, reporting, and forecasting the ecosystem benefits of sustainable forest management.

Abstract

Tropical forests and woodlands are key components of the global carbon cycle, and have large potential to help mitigating climate change. Their capacity to sequester carbon is likely diminished by the increasing drought intensity. Yet, little is known how droughts affect wood production at pantropical scale. Tropical tree-ring data can help filling this gap. Researchers at Universities of Arizona (US), Campinas (BR) and Wageningen (NL) therefore initiated the tropical tree-ring network (https://tropicaltreeringnetwork.org/). This network now contains ~500 chronologies: time series of population-level diameter growth. We used this network to answer the following questions: (1) is growth reduced during drought years? (2) is growth also suppressed after the drought years, i.e, are there legacy effects? (3) what factors determine the magnitude of drought effects? Our results reveal that effects are overall mild, reducing ring width by 2-4%, on average. We found no evidence of legacy effect during the two years following the drought. Drought effects were stronger for Gymnosperms than Angiosperms, and in more variable and arid climates. These results suggest substantial resilience of woody productivity in tropical vegetation to droughts. The study also illustrates the potential of tropical dendrochronology to contribute to global change studies.

Bio

Pieter Zuidema is a tropical forest ecologist and full professor at Wageningen University, the Netherlands. He received his BSc, MSc and PhD degrees in biology and tropical ecology at Utrecht University, the Netherlands. For his PhD, he conducted a demographic study to assess sustainable exploitation of Amazonian forests in Bolivia, where I lived and worked for 3 years. Pieter’s research deals with the effects of climate change and management of tropical forests. For instance, using tree rings, stable isotopes and simulation models, Pieter and his research team study effects of climatic variation and CO2 rise on tropical tree growth. He also develops timber tracing tools to fight illegal trade, using chemical and genetic analyses. He is currently on sabbatical at the University of Arizona’s tree-ring lab.

No additional detail for this event.

A panel of recent graduates and current students who are close to finishing their degrees will answer current students’ questions the final stages of the PhD process. The panelists are listed below:

Katie Orndahl

GEODE Lab (Goetz)

Aaron Teets

Richardson Lab

Emily Palmquist

Ecological Synthesis Lab (Ogle)

Jenna Keany

Megabiota Lab (Doughty)