Seminar and Events Schedule

Ecoinformatic tools for research, policy and international collaboration on tropical forests and peatlands

Curating data from international networks and collaborations has improved our understanding of the ecological processes that take place in tropical forests. The ForestPlots.net platform was developed to facilitate the process of managing and analyzing  long-term datasets of forests. This session will present some of the challenges of large-scale data collaborations, key discoveries that are possible by bringing multiple datasets together; and how the lessons learnt are being applied to peatland research.

No additional detail for this event.

Analytics for Improving and Protecting Agricultural Productivity for Smallholder Farmers.  Neil Hausmann is a Senior Program Officer in the Agricultural Development portfolio at The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation. In this role, Neil provides targeted investments to teams of researchers to develop, de-risk and deploy interventions to improve the agricultural derived income and nutrition of smallholder farmers. Prior to joining BMGF in 2020, Neil worked for 15 years at Pioneer Hi-Bred and Corteva Agriscience in breeding, digital ag and field phenotyping and modeling.

The Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation is working with the public crop product development organizations, start-ups and academia to develop integrated analytics suites to understand changing climates and their current and future impact on biotic and abiotic challenges to crops for smallholder farmers in Sub-Saharan Africa and South Asia. This solution set is aimed to help breeders develop products that meet environmental challenges as well as meet farmers and consumer preferences. Additionally, working closely with Ministers of Agriculture and National Plant Protection Organizations, the Gates Foundation funds Early Warning Systems designed to use scouting and pest control mechanisms to effectively control and prevent emerging transboundary biotic challenges.

Climate Change and Nitrogen: Too Much or Not Enough? 

Human activities are leading to changes in climate that are having feedbacks to both human and ecosystem health. These impacts are important to understand since forests can help us mitigate (or reduce) climate change and because forests also help humans adapt to climate change by cooling local temperatures and retaining compounds like ozone and nitrogen oxides from the atmosphere and nitrogen in soils that would otherwise diminish air and water quality and further lead to climate change and damage to human health. It is important to recognize that there are many threats to forest health and function that could diminish their functioning. In this talk I’ll share our recent studies evaluating the effects of climate change, atmospheric deposition, and land-use change on the health and functioning of forest ecosystems.