Understanding and managing forests is crucial to understanding and potentially mitigating the effects of climate change, invasive species, and shifting land use on natural systems and human society. However, collecting data on individual trees in the field is expensive and time consuming, which limits the scales at which this crucial data is collected.
PH.D STUDENT POSITION IN COMMUNITY ECOLOGY The Ernest Lab at the University of Florida has an opening for a Ph.D student interested in research in the area of community ecology, forecasting, and/or temporal dynamics to start fall 2020.
It’s not uncommon to hear stories of mistakes resulting in graduates students missing paychecks. This is a major problem because most students live month-to-month and can’t wait for a missed check to be fixed in the next pay cycle. Despite the commonness and dramatic impact of missed pay in graduate school*, it’s common to see these issues written off as isolated incidents and not part of a more systematic problem.
The weecology group is coming in force to the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America which is being held in New Orleans next week. We’ve been up to a quite diversified list of things over the past year ranging from temporal dynamics of communities to forecasting and remote sensing. We also have people involved in a number of outreach or training events this year.
We are excited to announce the first release of a new Julia package that let’s you run our Data Retriever software with a native Julia interface. For those of you not familiar with Julia it is a new programming language that is similar to R and Python, has a central focus on data analysis, and is designed from the ground up to be fast. It is an emerging scientific programming and data analysis language.
Scaling-up ecological patterns and processes is crucial to understanding the effects of environmental change on natural systems and human society. We are piloting a Data Science Challenge where multiple groups attempt to use the same remote sensing data from low flying airplanes to infer the location and type of trees in forests. This will allow forests to be studied in detail at much larger scales than is currently possible.
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How has our collection of weather data at the Portal Project changed through time? Weecology Project Manager Glenda Yenni recounts the saga of the weather stations.
Today’s reblog from the Portal Project is a piece by Tom Valone how the site inspired him to ponder vegetation change.
Love to see paired photos of places in the past and now? My PhD student Erica Christensen has a treat for you. Here’s a post about her attempts to reshoot old photos from the site.