Submitted by Lara Marie Kueppers on
Ongoing changes in climate and land use are increasing the disturbance frequency and shortening the carbon residence time in forest ecosystems around the world. Following disturbances, forests experience profound changes in canopy height, canopy openness, and significant shifts in species composition, and these changes may persist for several decades. To understand how these structural and functional changes of forests will impact the water, carbon, and energy cycles in a changing Earth, it is critical to integrate observed data with predictive terrestrial biosphere models. We seek up to two students to contribute to the data integration with the Functionally Assembled Terrestrial Ecosystem Simulator (FATES), a predictive terrestrial biosphere model, on two projects: (1) improving the representation of functional diversity in tropical moist forests and tropical dry forests across the Americas; (2) improving the links between field observations, remote sensing data and model in mixed conifer forests in the Sierra Nevada in California. Students could contribute to one or both projects, depending on their interest and time availability.
The undergraduate researchers will contribute to incorporating data to an expanding database of plant functional traits across the study regions, performing quality assessment and quality control. They will also contribute to the development and testing of statistical models relating plants structural and functional characteristics that can be incorporated to the FATES model.
These positions are ideal for students with interests in plant ecology, statistical analysis and scientific coding. Basic knowledge of R, Python (or other computer languages) and Jupyter notebooks will be helpful. This position requires handling large datasets to produce high-quality data, so it is essential to have good organization, attention to detail, and critical assessment of the results. Students interested in learning more about predictive terrestrial biosphere models should note this in their application.