Paleo-Ecological Observatory Network

PalEON (the Paleo-Ecological Observatory Network) is an interdisciplinary team of paleoecologists, ecological statisticians, and ecosystem modelers from across a number of institutions. Our goal is to reconstruct forest composition, fire regime, and climate in forests across the northeastern US and Alaska over the past 2000 years and then use this to drive and validate terrestrial ecosystem models. We will develop a coherent spatiotemporal inference framework to quantify trends and extreme events in paleoecological and paleoclimatic time series. Variables such as forest composition, fire regime, and moisture balance will be inferred from corresponding paleoecological proxies, with rigorous estimates of uncertainty.

Primary Investigators

Jason McLachlan (University of Notre Dame)

Michael Dietze (Boston University)

Phil Higuera (University of Montana)

Mevin Hooten (USGS and Colorado State University)

Steve Jackson (USGS and University of Arizona)

Jenn Marlon (Yale University)

Dave Moore (University of Arizona)

Chris Paciorek (University of California – Berkeley)

Neil Pederson (Harvard Forest)

Jack Williams (University of Wisconsin)

PalEON Limmerick by Steve Jackson
The PalEON nerds all went Bayesian
Their colleagues all thought they were crazy
So they crunched all the datas
And computed the Betas
The results all turned out quite amazian