This September, Steve Jackson steps into the position of Center Director for the U.S. Department of the Interior’s Southwest Climate Science Center, one of eight regional centers created to provide land managers with the best available science to assist in the management of the nation’s natural and cultural resources. Read more here.
PalEON’s summer course, “Assimilating long-term data into ecosystem models,” is in full swing in the northwoods of Michigan and Wisconsin. Sixteen graduate students and post-docs arrived from around the globe to learn the tools and methodology advanced by the PalEON Project. The students collected and analyzed tree cores in an old growth forest, dissected a lake sediment freeze core, and really dug into modules on Bayesian data analysis, data assimilation, and ecosystem modeling. We’re looking forward to seeing how they apply these tools in their independent projects!
Check out photos from the course here.
The PalEON Team will be hosting a special session at the Ecological Society of America conference in Portland, OR. The session will be an open forum to discuss the current activities, challenges, and opportunities in the PalEON project and to engage the broader community working across paleoecology, statistics, and modeling disciplines at regional scales.
All are welcome…stop by on August 8 from 8:00 PM-10:00 PM in D136, Oregon Convention Center
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.
This summer has seen the publication of two manuscripts following from work done by PalEON postdocs Bjorn Brooks in Mike Dietze’s lab and Simon Goring in Jack Williams’ lab. Additionally, Steve Jackson produced a review on paleoecological inference in Quaternary Science Reviews. For more information, see the Publications page. Additionally, you can read Simon’s thoughts on the Goring et al. 2012 paper on his blog Down with Time here.
Two out of three downscaled GCM driver datasets are now available for use to run PalEON phase 1 modeling simulations. The final driver dataset will be available soon.
See the course flyer for full details.
Participating faculty: Mike Dietze (University of Illinois); Steve Jackson (University of Wyoming); Jason McLachlan (University of Notre Dame); Chris Paciorek (UC Berkeley); Jack Williams (University of Wisconsin)
When: August 12-18. 2012
Location: University of Notre Dame Environmental Research Center, Land O’Lakes, WI.
Fees: This workshop is funded by a grant from the National Science Foundation. You must provide your own means of transportation to Chicago or Madison.
Application: We are seeking students with interests and backgrounds in paleoecology, terrestrial ecosystem modeling, and/or statistics. Send a CV, a statement as to why you want to take the course and how you anticipate it helping your research, and arrange to have a letter sent from your major advisor supporting your application.
Deadline: March 30, 2012. Selections announced by April 15, 2012
Apply to: jmclachl@nd.edu
After months of hard work behind the scenes by Bjorn Brooks, we are proud to announce the release of the PalEON MIP Protocol – Phase 1. We would like to encourage the broader modeling community to participate in this important project.
Part of the PalEON MIP protocol draws upon existing “steady-state” runs. If you have produced such runs for other projects or MIPs (NACP, MsTMIP) please consider submitting the pre-settlement portion of such runs
If you would like to participate please email Mike Dietze to be put on our email list and to recieve a login to the sftp server.
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!