PalEON PI Mike Dietze recently gave a talk, “Synthesis, model validation, and data-assimilation on centennial time-scales” at the North American Carbon Program’s 4th All Investigators Meeting in Albuqueque, NM.  You can find his presentation here, or check out other talks from the meeting on the NACP meeting page here.

PalEON postdoc Simon Goring recently presented his work with historic vegetation data in the US Midwest at the International Biogeography Society 2013 meeting in Miami, Florida.  His talk, “Estimating pre-settlement vegetation in the American Midwest: Exploring climate relationships and links to proxy data for robust data assimilation,” builds on Simon’s work to generate spatial data layers providing settlement-era forest composition, density, and biomass estimates  derived from US Public Land Survey data from the 1800’s.  You can check out Simon’s thoughts on the IBS conference on his blog, Down with Time, or view slides from his presentation on figshare here.

PalEON PI’s Chris Paciorek and Mike Dietze, along with PalEON participant Martin Tingley, are slated to speak at the upcoming “Workshop on geological data fusion: tackling the statistical challenges of interpreting past environmental change,” hosted by Rutgers University’s Center for Discrete Mathematics and Theoretical Computer Science (DIMACS) on January 17-18, 2013.

If you are interested in attending the workshop, check out the Workshop Announcement on DIMACS website for more information.  Talks are by invitation only, but posters are welcome (abstracts due December 14, 2012).  If you’re interested in attending the workshop, you can find registration information here.  Pre-registration deadline is January 10, 2013.

Team members, save the date! We’ll be meeting the weekend before AGU in Berkeley, California, to share progress and results to date. We’ll also plan our next steps to meet research goals, with a focus on paleoclimate and modeling efforts.

PalEON PI Mike Dietze was invited to speak about his work on two NSF Macrosystems Biology projects at the NEON, Inc., Annual Membership Meeting held this week in Washington, DC.  His talk today, “A Tale of Two Macrosystems Biology Projects,” detailed the goals, progress, and plans of both PalEON and a second Macrosystems project on which Mike works, “Climate change impacts on forest biodiversity.”

ESA evening get together for the team to share project updates and plan upcoming work at 5 pm in the Oregon Metro Building, 600 NE Grand, Portland, in room 307A/B.

Jason McLachlan’s talk, “Integrating long-term data into ecological forecasting models” will be at 3:40 pm in B116, Oregon Convention Center.

Notre Dame hosted PalEON’s first annual meeting in Chicago on January 2-5, 2012. Topics centered around data assimilation, site design, and vegetation, paleoclimate, and disturbance modeling. Lots of productive discussion and team building!

Please stop by the PalEON-sponsored poster session “(B21D) Millennial-Scale Ecosystem Dynamics: a Synthesis of Models and Paleoecological Data”Tuesday morning at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting (Dec 5-9)!

PalEON project posters include:

B21D-0275. Last millennia terrestrial ecosystem model intercomparison: challenges and goals Bjorn-Gustaf Brooks; Michael C. Dietze; Jason S. McLachlan

B21D-0276. Using historical data to constrain long term carbon dynamics in land surface models: processes and data. David J. Moore; Michael C. Dietze; Daniel M. Ricciuto; Andrew D. Richardson; Rob Braswell

B21D-0278. Statistical Models for Inferring Vegetation Composition from Fossil Pollen Chris Paciorek; Jason S. McLachlan; Zuofeng Shang

B21D-0279. Sedimentation rates in eastern North America reveal strong links between regional climate, depositional environments, and sediment accumulation Simon J. Goring; Jason S. McLachlan; Stephen T. Jackson; Maarten Blaauw; J. Andrés Christen; Jenn Marlon; Jessica Blois; John W. Williams

B21D-0285. Using settlement vegetation data for paleoclimate and carbon modeling: Preliminary results of the PalEON project. Simon J. Goring; Jason S. McLachlan; Jack W. Williams; Stephen T. Jackson; Bjorn-Gustaf Brooks; David R. Foster; Chris Paciorek; David J. Mladenoff; Sydne Record; Andy Finley; Jonathan Thompson; Michael C. Dietze

Thank you also to all of our great friends and colleagues who are participating in the PalEON session! The success of this session really highlights the important work, and growing interest, in the community to synthesize paleo data and make it relevant to climate change modeling.