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OSS 2014 Synthesis Projects

Tony Chang edited this page Jul 29, 2014 · 72 revisions

This page contains a current overview of the focus of each of the OSS 2014 synthesis projects. Each group can edit and update as needed.

NCEAS Group 1: Marine Community Dynamics

  • Title: Do citizen science data and researcher collected data show the same ecological patterns?
  • Participants: Annie Schmidt, Brian Stock, Rachael Orben, Georgina Adams, Suzanne Langridge, Mary Donovan, Lynn Waterhouse
  • Summary: Compare citizen science data and researcher collected data at multiple locations and trophic levels to investigate whether both types of data exhibit the same 1) trends in species abundance over time; 2) relationships to environmental (ocean) variables. Also potentially, 3) are these relationships decoupling over time due to anthropogenic forcing?
  • Message Box Feedback NCEAS Group 1
  • Working list of citizen science organizations

NCEAS Group 2: Macrosystems drought

  • Title: The current California drought: how bad is it?
  • Participants: Timothy Assal, Leah Bremer, Debora Drucker, Vicken Hills, Sparkle Malone, Antonio Jesús Pérez Luque, Paul Selmants, Mirela Tulbure, Sara Varela
  • Summary: Objective: Drought effects on natural and agricultural ecosystems: Implications for water, carbon, and socio-economic impacts.
  • Message Box Feedback NCEAS Group 2

How severe is the current drought in CA? We plan to synthesize ecosystem CO2 dynamics and remotely sensed indices to frame the severity of the CA drought.

  1. Are natural ecosystems more resilient than agricultural ecosystems?
  2. What are the spatial and temporal dynamics of drought?
  3. What are the effects of drought on ecosystem services? (INVEST)
  4. How much has C sink strength been reduced by the current drought?

NCEAS Group 3: Plant community dynamics

  • Title: Quantifying the relative importance of biotic and abiotic factors in determining plant species' distributions across spatial scales.
  • Participants: Katherine Renwick, Diego Sotomayor, Chris Trisos, Julia Buck, Megan Jennings, Lynn Sweet, Jenn Weaver
  • Summary: We propose to use structural equation modeling and species distribution modeling to evaluate and quantify the role of competition, disturbance, climate, and soil for determining the current distribution and abundance of tree species with different traits. We plan to compare these relationships at the local scale versus the landscape scale for common tree species in forested ecosystems in the Western US.
  • Group 3 Additional Resources
  • Message Box Feedback NCEAS Group 3

RENCI Group 1: Marine Population Dynamics and Collapse

  • Title: Unexpected marine animal collapses (working title)
  • Participants: Vanessa Michelou, Annie Anderson, Ingrid Knapp, Edgar Gonzalez, Emma Fuller, Ben Carr, Nina Lany
  • Summary: In fisheries, the probability of a stock collapsing varies strongly from region to region but the mechanism is unknown. We'd like to use the Ram-Myers database to quantify naturally occurring variation in stock abundance among regions and use publicly available data (e.g. remotely sensed oceanographic variables such as those from IOOS, continuous plankton records, human impacts from Sea Around Us) to assess the relative importance of abiotic variables, food web interactions, coastal development, and management practices in determining the probability of collapse.
  • Message Box Feedback RENCI Group 1
  • RENCI Group 1 - General Feedback

RENCI Group 2: Land-use intensity and ecosystem services

  • Title: Multiscale interactions between land-use, biodiversity, and ecosystem services
  • Participants: Kelly Garbach, Olivia Burge, Silvia Lomascolo, Tyson Wepprich
  • Summary: How do biodiversity & ecosystem services vary across a land-use intensification gradient (e.g., natural habitat, agriculture with different pesticide use, urban)? How do key functional groups (e.g., pollinators, pest predators, primary producers) influence ecosystem services? Are ecosystem services context-dependent on the land-use intensity: at what point should land sparing versus land sharing be used to increase agricultural productivity to maximize ecosystem services?
  • Message Box Feedback RENCI Group 2
  • RENCI Group 2 - General Feedback

RENCI Group 3: Dimensions of biodiversity (so what?)

  • Title: Using large experimental datasets to assess patterns in diversity effects
  • Participants: Pamela Reynolds, Kes Schroer, Monica Granados, Liz Kalies, Marissa Lee
  • Summary: Biodiversity is changing at both local and global scales, which is of concern to both ecosystem managers and theoretical ecologists. While numerous experiments across systems have shown that biodiversity generally has a strong positive effect on ecosystem function, with important benefits for specific ecosystem services, there are notable exceptions. To understand why some experiments show strong effects of diversity, while others do not, we aim to expand upon the dataset started by an OSS 2013 group project. Specifically, we will leverage different dimensions of biodiversity (taxonomic, phylogenetic, functional diversity) to explore underlying differences in effect sizes from a suite of diversity experiments (Cardinale et al. 2009). We can then link differences between and within biodiversity relatedness to derive generalities in biodiversity effects across taxonomic groups, trophic levels, and ecosystems.
  • Message Box Feedback RENCI Group 3
  • RENCI Group 3 - General Feedback

RENCI Group 4: Multi-scale Ecohydrology

  • Title: Ecohydrologic Responses to Disturbance Events
  • Participants: Jon Duncan, Tony Chang, John Lovette, Tian Gan, Michael Treglia
  • Summary: In the past 30 years, land management protocols, climate change, and land use have radically changed the frequency and magnitudes of disturbance regimes. Landscape scale disturbances can change a forest structure, resulting in impacts on adjacent watersheds that may affect water amount/quality for human and natural resource use. Our project hopes to analyze the biogeochemical, hydrologic, and biodiversity impacts of a suite of disturbance events resulting from a vegetation cover shift. These disturbance events include: wildfire, insect/disease, deforestation(logging), hurricanes, ice storms, and human land use. Our two major questions are: 1) Can the effects of disturbance on ecohydrology be generalized across regions, time scales, and spatial scales? 2) What are the factors (climate, geomorphology, forest cover type, edaphic conditions) that lead watersheds to respond similarly to a disturbance event? After an initial literature review, we hope to gather datasets of disturbance from the MODIS Global Disturbance Index (NTSG), Landsat 7 Global Forest Change (Hansen dataset), and the Degree of Human Modification (Theobald dataset). Ecohydrologic response data will be acquired from the USGS NWIS, USFS LTER climDB/hydroDB, and the CUAHSI HIS.
  • Message Box Feedback RENCI Group 4
  • RENCI Group 4 - General Feedback
  • [RENCI Group 4 - Initial workflow diagram] (http://i.imgur.com/IHrn4zD.png)