Author: Ben Poulter

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Wrap up of summer activities (Sept. 2015)

July 2015: Flurin Babst from Arizona Tree Ring Lab. visiting for the summer – welcome to Bozeman!

July 2015: Jerad Hoy’s summer (2014) research featured in the IoE newsletter on his interactive tool to help understand US emission targets

June 2015: Katie and Kristen at the USGS North Central Science Center Open Science meeting

June 2015: Katie Renwick (PhD CSU) joins the lab to work on climate impacts of sagebrush systems

June 2015: Further confirmation and evidence for the importance of semi-arid systems in the global carbon cycle Ahlstrom et al. Science

May 2015: Leo off to JAMSTEC (Japan), Zhen at WSL (CH) and Nicolas at LSCE (France) for summer research

May 2015: Read an accompanying article in The Conversation discussing how changes in water-use efficiency and transpiration, published by David Frank, myself and others on May 11, 2015 in Nature Climate Change

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Register for Ecological Modeling BIOE 591 for fall 2014

Ecological Modeling BIOE 591

Dr. Ben Poulter, Department of Ecology

 

Many ecological processes take place at time scales that are either too fast or slow, or occur at spatial scales either too small or large, for direct observation. With a wealth of ecological data steadily accumulating from various networks of vegetation plots (e.g., US Forest Inventory Analysis), ecosystem experiments (e.g., Next Generation Ecosystem Experiments), plant traits (e.g., TRY) and remote sensing (e.g., European Space Agency Climate Change Initiative), it is becoming increasingly possible to understand ecosystem processes across the complete range of scales to address questions related to i) climate change impacts, ii) disturbance regimes, iii) land management, and iv) land-surface feedbacks, for example. This course will introduce students to ecological modeling as a tool for integrating data from observations and experiments with theoretical approaches, with a particular focus on terrestrial ecosystems. A comprehensive range of topics will be covered; including those related to ecosystem development (i.e., establishment, growth, competition, mortality and disturbance), issues associated with aggregating and scaling ecological data, and introduction to various approaches used for computer modeling. By the end of the course, students will be expected to understand a variety of approaches for abstracting observed ecosystem processes to models, have a background in the technical tools available to construct computer models, and be able to critically evaluate modeling approaches used in major synthesis assessments such as the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change Reports.