Matt Heard: The My.
Matt Heard: there's obviously a couple of things to note number one. You're being recorded. So pay attention to that, but just wanted to give you a heads up on how this will work. So thank you so much for coming to our first virtual Nefa event, and for participating in this first step of our research coordination network. My name is Matt Herd. I'm. A professor at Belmont University, and one of the copies of the Grant
Matt Heard: just wanted to say really quickly, just a reminder. This is obviously a professional meeting, and so we want to keep this as professional as possible. The chat is open. But again, let's be professionals about this, and as our presenters are speaking, just a reminder to please keep yourself muted so we can make sure that we give them their full attention.
Matt Heard: And thank you again for everybody coming. We're really excited about this, trying to create a big networking opportunity and a chance to get to know a little bit more about Macro Systems ecology work. So from there i'll turn it over to the lead pi of the Grant, Lori Anderson, who's at Ohio, Wesley and University?
Laurie Anderson: Right? Good morning, everyone. And as as Matt said, my name is Lori Anderson, I'm. A professor at a small college in Central Ohio, Ohio, Wesleyan, and my specialty area is plant ecology.
Laurie Anderson: But in my
Laurie Anderson: I guess, scholarly life I am the president of the Board of Directors for the ecological research as education Network, also known as Aaron
and I'm. Thrilled to introduce our new research coordination network. The Macro Systems ecology for all network or Mefa.
Laurie Anderson: which is a spin off of Aaron, and I have a few slides that i'm going to use to give you a little bit of an overview of what Nefa is all about.
Laurie Anderson: and then we'll go ahead and hear from some macro systems ecologists. So let me go ahead and share my screen
Laurie Anderson: and let me switch also into a presentation mode here.
Laurie Anderson: So.
Laurie Anderson: and a second.
Laurie Anderson: let me just say.
Laurie Anderson: stop, share for a moment. Make sure that my slideshow. Mode is in
Laurie Anderson: way.
Laurie Anderson: I'll try this again
Laurie Anderson: alright, now. It should be working
Laurie Anderson: all right.
Laurie Anderson: so I start out with just an a kind of overview of what Mfa is all about. The Mfa network supports faculty from all backgrounds in developing collaborative macro systems. Ecology projects for research and for teaching
Laurie Anderson: with a focus on diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice.
Laurie Anderson: And this is growing out of the collaborative research network. That is the ecological research as education network.
Laurie Anderson: and we are funded by the research coordination network program out of the Macro Systems ecology program of the National Science Foundation and our funding runs from 2,022 through 2,027.
Laurie Anderson: And, as Matt said, we're thrilled to have you with us today to launch the network officially.
Laurie Anderson: So i'll start with a quick. What is Macro Systems Ecology, and I'm. Using a definition here from Heffernan at all. An excellent paper that I recommend
Laurie Anderson: Macro systems. Ecology is the study of diverse ecological phenomena at the scales of regions to continents and their interactions with phenomena at other scales.
And I love this example of the Amazon rainforest as a way to illustrate what we mean by macro systems ecology.
Laurie Anderson: If you think about clearing a forest that changes dynamics that a lot of us ecologists might measure on the on the ground, locally, like the interactions between trees and grass
Laurie Anderson: that can lead to a change in landscape level patterns in vegetation, with patches of trees and grass
Laurie Anderson: that can affect rainfall patterns and fire dynamics in the region.
Laurie Anderson: and that means there is a feedback between what's happening at a very local scale, and what's happening at a more landscape or regional scale.
Laurie Anderson: And of course, if you go to the entire global scale with the Amazon rainforest, the vegetation clearing is being driven by global scale demands for beef. So it's this systems thinking that I think really characterizes macro systems. Ecology
Laurie Anderson: in our network. What we would like to embrace in the ideal project is macro systems. Ecology concepts
Laurie Anderson: a diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice plan for each project for collaborative science.
Laurie Anderson: We'd also like the projects to make use of existing environmental data sets and lean on the exciting emerging tools and data science.
Laurie Anderson: We'd like to see if our projects can connect to local community concerns.
Laurie Anderson: and we'd also like to involve students in our projects, since many of us in Aaron and in Nefa, we expect will come from teaching oriented institutions.
Laurie Anderson: So in this I know it's a fairly complicated figure. I'm showing you here, but
Laurie Anderson: we're starting from where Aaron was, which was a network of sites collecting data with students in a coordinated fashion. And that's at the lower part of the figure.
Laurie Anderson: And what we're hoping to do with mifa is really encourage people to think about how those local data sets that we've been collecting and networking together can
Laurie Anderson: interact with Macro scale phenomena and how they are connected to macro scale phenomena. And are there existing data sets? We could pair with our local data collection efforts that would help us think more at the Macro scale.
Laurie Anderson: and it's important to realize that Mfa Doesn't assume expertise. We're planning to build it together. So we are not expecting people to come in with all of these things in place
Laurie Anderson: we're expecting people, or hoping that people are interested in excited in learning with us. I will admit I am not an expert in Macro systems ecology, but I find it fascinating, and i'd like to learn with a group of engaged colleagues about this this area of work.
Laurie Anderson: So these are the specific goals in mifa to expand faculty training. And. you know, think about lots of different opportunities to introduce people to macro systems, principles and existing environmental data sets
Laurie Anderson: to create a diversity, equity, inclusion, and justice focused network that will be accessible and inclusive for scientists and students of all backgrounds.
Laurie Anderson: We want to enable collaborative macro systems research very much on the Aaron model where people are working together on a common project. And we want to use these projects to educate students through the research experience.
Laurie Anderson: There are lots of benefits to exploring macro systems ecology. I have some of them listed here. This is a very important emerging area. Many environmental problems have macro systems, dimensions. There's great potential for collaboration.
Laurie Anderson: We have a large data set that allow research and teaching, even without a field site. So this can be an equalizer. And there are a lot of opportunities to teach students data science through macro systems, ecology projects.
Laurie Anderson: We have a number of challenges. Many of us grew up. If you will, as single-site researchers and some of these concepts that connect across scales can be challenging and complex.
Laurie Anderson: We think that working with large data sets requires faculty training for some of us. I know i'm amongst those folks
Laurie Anderson: student quantitative skills for engaging with this are very variable, so we have to deal with that. And then, if we're going to work collaboratively, we need to invest some time in project management.
Laurie Anderson: But the Meepa network is planning to provide training in all these areas to address the challenges, so more faculty can take advantage of the benefits.
Laurie Anderson: So we're starting right now. Our speakers today will provide research snapshots
Laurie Anderson: that will get us all thinking about how we can connect with Macro systems ecology. So that's the plan.
Laurie Anderson: So I will stop sharing my screen, and without further ado i'll move into introducing our first speaker.
Laurie Anderson: Let me
Laurie Anderson: make sure i'm out of my slide show here.
Laurie Anderson: and
Laurie Anderson: I'm very pleased to present as our first speaker, Dr. Robbie Burger, from the University of Kentucky. Dr. Berger is an interdisciplinary evolutionary, and macroeologist who uses theoretical models to motivate empirical tests in the field
Laurie Anderson: with and with big data.
Laurie Anderson: His collaborative research in human macroeology has result resulted in core macro ecological principles that guide the use and distribution of resources and reveal challenges to sustainability.
Laurie Anderson: And his will be the first example project that we'll think about.
Laurie Anderson: Please take it away, Robbie.
Robbie Burger: Okay, I guess you can hear me now.
Robbie Burger: Okay, thanks.
Robbie Burger: Lori, for that very generous introduction.
Robbie Burger: Thanks. Everyone for joining us. I'm very excited to be involved in this.
Robbie Burger: Take off the event for Meta.
Robbie Burger: and today I'm going to present
Robbie Burger: some research that was actually led by an undergraduate, Alli Hughes at the University of Arizona. I was there previously as a postdoc in the bridging biodiversity and conservation science program
Robbie Burger: prior to starting a faculty position at University, of Kentucky. This will be sort of human mac or ecology, so i'm also very interested in you know co-developing how we think about macro systems in general. This is sort of a human example.
Robbie Burger: and it was very collaborative. Lad. Key, for example, is a an urban planner. Deborah Shears does the landscape and global change.
Robbie Burger: Kimberly Cook is a Phd student at my lab was previously a has a masters in library science. So i'm library data, science prior to starting research and biodiversity.
Robbie Burger: Fine
Robbie Burger: a little bit more about my background. So I did my undergraduate at Francis, me on University. It's a poi. 4,000 undergraduate students.
Robbie Burger: very few graduate programs. and I was actually an economics and international studies. Major
Robbie Burger: I. With the first Jen
Robbie Burger: student, and so I really wasn't aware of careers and biology outside of
Robbie Burger: the health profession.
Robbie Burger: I serendipitously, as I say, took a tropical geography and biology course that was called through Francis Marion.
Robbie Burger: and I was just sort of one away by tropical biodiversity.
Robbie Burger: and subsequently got involved in a research project
Robbie Burger: with a professor at Francis Marian studying a wood rock population on campus. And so this led to my first publication, and I've still been interested in thinking about
Robbie Burger: ecology and economics
Robbie Burger: mammals in general, including humans. and so ended up doing a Phd. At the University of New Mexico, and
Robbie Burger: through a lot of my graduate work and my lab. Currently, these are sort of the 2 things 2 motivating questions
Robbie Burger: they're interested in as Mac 3 colleges. First.
Robbie Burger: what are the general rules that govern by diversity? All right.
Robbie Burger: A call for scale? And how can we apply these rules to practical issues and
Robbie Burger: given ecology, global change, conservation and sustainability?
Robbie Burger: Again, our study system is the diversity of mammals, including humans
Robbie Burger: to that end. I've been working with, you know, collaborating with social, biological, physical physical scientists, occasionally epidemiologists and engineers and medical scientists so certainly inherently interdisciplinary given the topic.
Robbie Burger: What do we actually mean by human Mac or ecology? First of all, it is the city of humans and the range and the
Robbie Burger: full range of lifestyles and humans, from hunter-gatherer
Robbie Burger: societies to industrial urban dweller
Robbie Burger: it's Macro. I try to link equal parts theory and data and then a search for pattern and process.
Robbie Burger: And we do this across large scale, spatially, temporally, evolutionarily, how the humans compare to other species.
Robbie Burger: It's also ecological.
Robbie Burger: and that it involves the exchanges of energy materials and information between us and our environment
Robbie Burger: and the principles and laws that govern those exchanges.
Robbie Burger: Energy is a currency that I focus on a lot. Metabolic scaling has pointed out these
Robbie Burger: the statistical regularities, and how energy use scales with the size of organism.
Robbie Burger: Fiber's law was pointed out in the thirties, although it's an empirical relationship. So bigger organisms require more energy than small organisms. But bigger organisms become more efficient program. A tissue
Robbie Burger: as reflected by this 3 force exponent. humans, aren't anything special. We have a metabolic rate of about 100 watts at resting, so that's our basal metabolic rate. Our field metabolic rates or active metabolic rate. It's about 120 watts.
Robbie Burger: you know, roughly 2,000 K calories a day. What we know is required to sustain a healthy
Robbie Burger: lifestyle. What is unique about
Robbie Burger: humans is our capacity to incorporate extra metabolic energy
Robbie Burger: and the form of renewables and fossil fuels
Robbie Burger: that is used to power lifestyles that is different from just our biological metabolism alone. Okay?
Robbie Burger: And this actually varies enormously, globally from.
Robbie Burger: you know, just basic biologic one tab wasn't to up to 10,000 Watts. That's not more. And the most
Robbie Burger: the high highest income urban areas of the world. Okay. So 2 h of magnitude, higher energy, use and high income areas.
Robbie Burger: I teach ecology at Kentucky. So one of the things I might ask my students is to think about. Okay. It's metabolic rate a team production. It's.
Robbie Burger: you know, calories, the stools. It's what these are all interchangeable.
But
Robbie Burger: for a human or an individual animal, how not? We expect metabolic rate to vary over environmental or Ambient temperature.
Robbie Burger: Okay?
Robbie Burger: And so, you know, some students, hopefully, some of the groups get to something like this. Okay, or at least humans. This is something that was pointed out by Chulander and Erding in the 1,900 fiftys a study.
Robbie Burger: a series of studies funded by the navy.
Robbie Burger: And basically
Robbie Burger: what we see here is that for birds and mammals we have
Robbie Burger: the thermal neutral zone. So this is you can think about room temperature. This is where we are minimizing the amount of energy
Robbie Burger: that we're using to thermal regulate. Okay.
Robbie Burger: we're in that comfort zone as we
Robbie Burger: move out of that comfort zone. As temperatures get colder, we use more energy to maintain a constant body temperature. So we're we're shivering. In that case.
Robbie Burger: burning energy to stay warm
Robbie Burger: when temperatures get hotter. This might be a bit counterintuitive. We actually use more energy to try to cool ourselves off.
Robbie Burger: and that's through sweating. And humans. as well as some other animal. Panting is also very common, and birds and mammals.
Robbie Burger: And so this is the energy east response curve that we see for biological metabolism
Robbie Burger: and end of the term.
Robbie Burger: Okay, we can get into the math related to this. The students are interested
Robbie Burger: empirically. This is what it looks like. So Shalander and others have been subjecting animals to these experiments to chambers where we can control the temperature. Here's a desert cotton tail. This actually was data from
Robbie Burger: Tucson, Arizona. You can see the increase in the production on the cold temperatures as well as a hot temperature.
Laurie Anderson: Just to quickly interject. You have 2 min remaining.
Robbie Burger: Okay.
Robbie Burger: Okay. So for humans. we have by lots of the capitalism on the left. This is extra metabolic energy on the right. So this is the you know, fossil fuels and renewables used.
Robbie Burger: What's missing from previous studies is data for data for the hot end of this curve.
Robbie Burger: Okay, so that's what we're interested in. Can we extend empty
Robbie Burger: the show and or curve to these hotter temperatures?
Robbie Burger: We use data from these publicly available sites. energy use from the Eia census data for population and temperature. From
Robbie Burger: for them we have 10 service regions for the state of Arizona.
Robbie Burger: Here's what all the data look like. Okay. So the first thing we can we now have the increase in energy use on the hot side. We have a regression that we can now use for predict the building.
Robbie Burger: Again, we're using Arizona as a pur view of what the future might look like. Okay, so it's the increase in number of days above 100 degrees Strand. Height. This might be another thing. Peer, Share where you can ask your students to plug in future temperatures into this equation and predict what the increase in energy is
Robbie Burger: might look like.
Robbie Burger: There's also a lot of variation in this curve here, as a shown by the independent service region. and what we see is, if you see the ones with the bow tie, what's going on there is as
Robbie Burger: we move into the summer, there's actually a delay in using extra metabolic energy for for cooling
Robbie Burger: compared to going into the fall.
Robbie Burger: whereas other non-voti areas just have this
Robbie Burger: sort of linear relationship. Okay.
Robbie Burger: where the bow ties occur. Those are lower income areas. Their thermal neutral zone. Baseline energy uses lower as well as there is a delayed response in using energy going into the summer compared to high income areas.
Robbie Burger: And so, in addition to using this for predictability and anticipating energy demands in the future and hotter temperatures.
Robbie Burger: We can also
Robbie Burger: think about how this might inform policy implications, especially in low income region, and understand why this behavioral difference occurs.
Robbie Burger: Perhaps
Robbie Burger: policies that subsidize energy prices in these regions could mitigate
Robbie Burger: done with the future impact.
Robbie Burger: I think i'm about out of time I have to strap up. Now we're starting with basic principles to motivate how we analyze data, and it's certainly not. You know, loads of data. This is something that can be done
Robbie Burger: on a laptop using excel, and and bar
Robbie Burger: the curves are hopefully useful, and predicting the future. Understanding the income inequality associated with energy Use hopefully can inform policy decisions.
Robbie Burger: Thanks for your time again. Here, my co-authors and my email addresses there. If you'd like to get in touch with me.
Robbie Burger: Thank you
Laurie Anderson: Thank you very much, Robbie. I would really like to use some of those slides in my own class. That's really exciting.
Robbie Burger: All right.
Laurie Anderson: So I will now go ahead and introduce our next speaker.
Laurie Anderson: Napaka Zimmerman from the University of San Francisco, will be speaking next. and he is a microbial ecologist, collaboratively studying soil respiration in partnership with neon
Laurie Anderson: and currently he is leading a new faculty, mentoring cohort through bio quest and cubes.
Laurie Anderson: So, Napaka, i'll turn it over to you.
Naupaka Zimmerman: Can folks hear me and see the screen.
Naupaka Zimmerman: Great. So, my a a little bit for folks who are not familiar with usf Usf. Is not the University of California, San Francisco, and we are not San Francisco State. Everyone gets confused about those. Usf.
Naupaka Zimmerman: Is a primarily undergraduate Jesuit private institution in the city of San Francisco. They'll think like Boston college or Gonzaga, or something like that
Naupaka Zimmerman: in my 10 min Today I want to share sort of
Naupaka Zimmerman: 2 things. One is focusing a little bit on the research that Laurie mentioned, with our our work across me on sites looking at soil respiration. But I also want to spend probably about half of the time talking about how I've used neon data in particular to bring some of these sort of big scale thinking into my undergraduate
Naupaka Zimmerman: lab, as well as lecture classes.
Naupaka Zimmerman: So, starting off with with research. This project that I'm.
Naupaka Zimmerman: That i'll i'll share with you today is a collaborative project with John Silvitz, who is a professor in the Math and Computer Science Department at Augsburg University in Minnesota. And we've been working on this for the last few years.
Naupaka Zimmerman: Many of you are probably familiar with me on the National Ecological Observatory network. If you're not, I'd highly recommend checking it out. It's this fantastic resource that the National Science Foundation has funded it's in, I want to say, about its third year of operation out of a 30 year term.
Naupaka Zimmerman: and they have replicated observation sites across the Continental Us, Alaska, Canada.
Naupaka Zimmerman: Alaska, Hawaii, and Puerto Rico, not Canada.
Naupaka Zimmerman: and at each of those sites they have a set of replicated infrastructure for thinking about soil in particular they have what are called the soil plots, and this is an example from Harvard Forest, and you can see all of the instrumentation for a single soil, plot, and all of these things are being measured continuously
Naupaka Zimmerman: and uploaded for each of these sites.
Naupaka Zimmerman: The challenge here is that while all of these instruments are measuring data continuously. The thing that many ecologists really want out of a soil. Plot like this is a product that is not currently available, and that soil Co. 2 E flux, and this is really important to help partition
Naupaka Zimmerman: the carbon fluxes that otherwise get quantified, using the Eddie Flux towers that are each at each site
Naupaka Zimmerman: and trying to remove the sort of decomposition and soil respiration signal out of above ground photosynthesis and respiration.
Naupaka Zimmerman: And so what John and I are working to do is to develop that product. Continuous soil. Co: 2 E flux product, using all of those different data inputs from these continuously monitoring sensors at all the soil plots and then using a
Naupaka Zimmerman: a diffusion model parameterized by the site specific measurements to basically we're we're building an our package that basically can ingest all of those various continuous measurements, and spit out that efflux for folks to use.
Naupaka Zimmerman: And then the idea is to take this efflux product and use it to start thinking about the variation in the sort of soil biochemistry across each of these really different sites across the different neon locations. And so to make sure that we're we're sort of.
Naupaka Zimmerman: you know, in the right ballpark here with this modeling. We're also doing a field campaign.
Naupaka Zimmerman: And last summer I went out with some undergrads to southern Arizona, the Sierra foothills and the Pacific Northwest to visit 3 different Core me on sites and take and take field measurements, and this summer I'm. Heading to Kansas, North, Dakota, and Wisconsin to do the same.
Naupaka Zimmerman: And the idea here is, if if this is the plot at Harvard forest. This is a plot in Southern Arizona, the Santa Rita Experimental range, and so you can see the soil sensor array there, and then I bring a light core, and we put in a soil caller and take a measurements for a week basically
Naupaka Zimmerman: of the actual efflux. And so we can then use that to sort of check our models. And you know.
Naupaka Zimmerman: Southern Arizona all the way to Washington State is a pretty fabulous adventure for undergrads, and so I was lucky enough to take a couple out, and we went all the way from 115 in the shade in southern Arizona, in June, up to old growth, Douglas, for
Naupaka Zimmerman: you know, total rainstorm up in Washington State. And so they really got to see a whole lot of ecology which was pretty cool. And then that data we're using to to check the model prediction. So
Naupaka Zimmerman: the purple, blue, and green. Here are the modeled E fluxes and the red or the fuel measurements. And so again, we're still working on, tweaking all of these. But that's the sort of core idea.
Naupaka Zimmerman: Okay. So that's sort of a a. V. Yet about the research we're doing. But I did also want to share
Naupaka Zimmerman: about some of the ways that I've incorporated neon data and sort of macro systems thinking into my undergraduate teaching. I think a lot of folks on the call are at teaching institutions, and I think
Naupaka Zimmerman: I I've been saying this for years. But I think neon is this fabulous, fabulous resource for undergraduate educators
Naupaka Zimmerman: in particular. And the core idea for this, I think, is that you know.
Naupaka Zimmerman: when when students have the ability to drive their own inquiry. You know this this idea of doing real science. They get hooked. I mean, this is this is addicting. It's got all of us addicted, and students pick up on this, too.
Naupaka Zimmerman: and you know you go out. You do field work, you take measurements at you analyze your data, you understand what it means. And I mean this: this can change people's lives even just in a few weeks or or a summer.
Naupaka Zimmerman: And you know, research is back this out, particularly
Naupaka Zimmerman: when thinking about women and underrepresented minority students, the idea being that this development of relationships with peers and senior scientists increases belongingness and connections, as well as increasing skills, which are really really key for bringing folks in, and then retaining them within the STEM disciplines.
Naupaka Zimmerman: And traditionally. The way that this has happened is through things like honors. DC. And our use and these type of experiences which are which are fabulous and incredibly effective. But the problem is most institutions lack the resources to involve all or most students in these type of activities. I mean, this is just a reality.
Naupaka Zimmerman: And so how do you scale that?
Naupaka Zimmerman: And I think many of us are familiar with the idea of cures or course space undergraduate research experiences? When I, when I read this paper back, when I was a postdoc by oockingcloth at all, talking about sort of cures, and the the whole idea behind them.
Naupaka Zimmerman: I was very taken by it, because basically the idea is, you try and replicate in a classroom during the term, the same type of core insight, driven science experience that otherwise students would only be getting if they work in a research lab or do an ru, or something like this.
So this, you know, I think commonly people think of these things as happening in a research lab.
Naupaka Zimmerman: You know, this is an example from a microbiology class I teach.
Naupaka Zimmerman: They're in teaching labs. So these are not in faculty laboratories usually, and the work is all done during class.
Naupaka Zimmerman: and the idea is being that you're collecting real data based on student questions that they come up with that are that are hopefully open, ended, and together you and the students figure out what it is that they observe, and what it means
Naupaka Zimmerman: for ecology cures. This can happen also in the field. I'm. Sure many of us had an experience of running transacts through the inner title, or through some sort of aquatic zone and doing measurements. Here we're we're devastating trees in a in a local park.
Naupaka Zimmerman: And this type of experience can be really impactful for students, but it still it does require being able to take field trips and having infrastructure and time for that. And so I have also been thinking a lot about how do you put this kind of experience into lecture courses?
Naupaka Zimmerman: Because there are a lot of classes where that's the only exposure students may get to ecology in their for your biology curriculum.
Laurie Anderson: just letting you know you've got about 1 min 30 left.
Naupaka Zimmerman: Okay, yeah, I think i'll write about on schedule. Yeah. And and so the idea here is for a class that doesn't have any any background in coding or or much in ecology or stats. How do you get them? This sort of research experience?
Naupaka Zimmerman: And then this is the pitch where neon comes in? Because I think Neon provides this key thing of unanalyzed, really cleaned, really diverse across spatial temporal scales. Data sets that student can work. Students can work with. So here's an example from the Neon data portal
Naupaka Zimmerman: selecting organismal data from California. It's just most recently available, and students can just download this. So in the course we start slowly and intro to basic plotting in our
Naupaka Zimmerman: building through more complex data sets. Here's an example using small mammal data across the on-site and then balancing that with the normal background that you would teach in the ecology class. So here, thinking about invasive species students, we're looking about the distribution of invasive mosquitoes across the us using neon data.
Naupaka Zimmerman: And then, finally, the sort of capstone of the class is each student designs and executes a project entirely on their own, based on whatever neon data that they would like to work with. And so it really gives them a ton of opportunities.
Naupaka Zimmerman: And so for my last slide, just to leave you all with this. I I know M. For many folks the fun part of science is is not knowing what the answer is, and to figuring that out for the first time, and I really strongly believe that neon data can really help facilitate this at many different institutions.
Naupaka Zimmerman: and and let students have this experience in their classes. so I will stop there.
Laurie Anderson: Thank you very much. I just want to say that I went to an our workshop with Napaka at Esa, and I kind of date my true understanding of our from that moment. So i'm really glad to hear about how you're working with students
Laurie Anderson: to spread spread that knowledge and using the on data. That's awesome. Okay. So I will now introduce our next speaker.
Laurie Anderson: Dr. Ying's son from Cornell University.
Laurie Anderson: Dr. Sun's research centers on the roles that terrestrial vegetation play in climate, biosphere and hydrosphere interactions. She includes the following approaches in her work.
Laurie Anderson: leaf plant scale measurements, global climate modeling, remote sensing observations, big data, analysis, and artificial intelligence.
Laurie Anderson: Thus her research is interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary, and requires integrating multi-scale processes and multi-platform remote sensing observations
Laurie Anderson: in numerical modeling frameworks. I'll turn it over to Dr. Sent.
Ying Sun: Great. Thank you so much for your nice introduction, so let me try to share my screen.
Ying Sun: Kind of everyone. See my screen Wall.
Ying Sun: Okay, Cool: thanks so much. Yeah. So thank you very much for the nice introduction. It's my first time giving a a lecture to an audience that's focused on like in in teaching schools. So it's a bit of a challenge for me as well. So let's see. Okay.
Ying Sun: I'm. A associate professor at Cornell. How I become fascinated about a micro System Ecology. I would like to start from my career path.
Ying Sun: I was the trained as a geographer. When I was an undergraduate student in China, we, I have been taught, like Gis and the remote of sensing different tools, and how to really view different land forms on earth's surface.
Ying Sun: For my Phd, I was a trained as a climate scientist, basically looking at to say, the temperature changes
Ying Sun: in the past from pre-industrial to present and to present it to the future. The tools that I have been trying to to use is the global climate models or or system models that are used for Ipcc report.
Ying Sun: So all the data I'm looking. I have been looking at it when I was a Phd. Was these global maps, looking at the temperature, maps, precipitation maps, and also look at the time series from the very passive to the to the future.
Ying Sun: So oh.
Ying Sun: when I started at the micro system. Ecology research is, I think, in my second year of a Phd. I started to this paper publishing science from a scientist to Ancar, a Gordon Bonham, who
Ying Sun: try to look at how different forests
Ying Sun: mit ctl and feedback to climate system. So, traditionally, what we have been thinking is like how climate change You influence the different ecosystems on land. But this paper start to think 250.
Ying Sun: What's not from this paper, but this a paper try to summarize, and the census size, how the threshold ecosystems can feed back to climate change, and this paper tried to look at the bio physical feedback to say through albeito changes, and which you can change the the energy budget. And they also look at the water cycle. Say how the that transportation through you operated with cooling. Can you flown the local precipitation
Ying Sun: which can also further feed back to like the the tele connection to remote areas? For example, the Amazon region that Laura give example in the very beginning, and also try to look at
Ying Sun: how the ecosystems can sequester carbon from the atmosphere, because the the the carbon strength will determine how much atmosphere Co. 2 can be taken by the threshold ecosystem to curb climate change.
Ying Sun: So this paper tried to look at tropical forest, a temporary forest and burial forest, to see the relative strengths between the about physical feedback and about chemical feedbacks through the carbon cycle, and you can clearly see their different strengths, and they have. They can be either competing each other or complementary to each other in terms of their signs.
Ying Sun: So and these process these about physical process, like out beetle evaporative cooling. This process, and also about chemical process, have been incorporated into climate models.
Ying Sun: Basically it's the land, the part about fear models that are coupled to the big. Our our system models for climate simulations.
Ying Sun: So these models for the land part typically simulating, say, the surface energy fluxes say the solar radiation, long wave of radiation, and the the radiation balances, and how they influence temperature and their how they influence the term precipitation. It also includes the the hydrology part which we call water cycle that simulates the evaporation interception.
Ying Sun: and also the through fall on STEM flow, run off things like this.
Ying Sun: And these these line models also include the carbon cycle which is related to the micro system. Ecology that simulates the photo censuses, respiration from auto traffic and hydro traffic side, and also fires, and also sell about geochemistry and also new
Ying Sun: cycling, and how the carbon and nitrogen or Fosters interact with each other. So these are these type of models are the model I have been trained to use during my entire Phd.
Ying Sun: So why the the global, the carbon cycle matters. When we look at this latest, the global carbon cycle diagram, this is published by last year. They They do this update every year. When you look at the the the different arrows here, you can see, say, the biggest, the carbon in the to the atmosphere is a for through fossil fuel, right? And
Ying Sun: but
Ying Sun: only half of these fossil Fuel Co. 2 remains in the atmosphere, and that the other half is actually a sequester
Ying Sun: sequester by the land, by land and ocean. So oceans seques are about like 25%, and the land is about 25 to 30% of the of of the to the annual Co. 2 fossil fuel in in Asia here.
Ying Sun: and this is really why the land threshold ecosystem is so important that we can regulate the trajectory of Co. 2: concentration.
Ying Sun: Okay. So now, coming back to research in my lab, we strive to understand the 2 questions. Number One is, how do the natural and manage the treasury. Ecosystems respond, and also feedback to climate, change and variability.
Ying Sun: and also respond, and the feedback to the anthropogenic activities at multiple scales, and the second was how to monitor and predict these interactions and the cloud and the feedback. So within this complex system to inform policy making.
Ying Sun: So here I would like to give you some examples of, like a the what approaches or tools that we're using to study micro system. Ecology number one is, Siri. We develop the theoretical models to understand the photo synthesis, and also you have a transportation and put these series into our models and also utilize this series to interpret our data in
Ying Sun: physiologically and ecologically meaningful way. And the second approach tool is data. We gather a lot of data from leaf level to Canada level and to the globe.
Ying Sun: For example, this figure shows the leaf gathering changes, measurement by light car, and also the Pam system. Led by my student and my postdoc
Ying Sun: and this measurement. So we're down at the Cornell Botanic cardam. We also takes the canva level measurement to see. You'll see the 2 towers. One is measuring at the colors of a carbon nan. The water and energy fluxes, the other is measuring solar, induced colorful fluorescence, and then this one is like the satellite data my lab has been, has the expertise on which is to use a the bunch of different satellite measurement to understand
Ying Sun: the the global photo citizens of productivity. You have transportation so moisture from these many, many different measurements from the space. We also use models. As I mentioned before, we're trying to predict the climate bus for your the hemisphere interactions. So these figures shows our simulations at the regional scale and global skills.
Ying Sun: And finally, we would like to do applications in threshold ecology, utilizing the models and the data, and also the series.
Laurie Anderson: So I would like to in 2 min left.
Ying Sun: Okay, cool. Yeah. So, researcher tools, we use data both in situ uses flux towers, and also in space. We use a different
Ying Sun: a data set. For example, they said it can be used to study fires in Amazon looking at the evaporation. And also I try to map methane emissions. So these are just some examples, and that these data give you a spectral information that it can be utilized to retrieve the variables that are ecological in manufacturing.
Ying Sun: and the second a tool. Again, it's a model. The model is a mathematical tool with all the mathematical equations to represent the processes in, say, crowds fear lana, surface, hydrology, and atmosphere.
Ying Sun: So these are tools that we're using, and we're also developing theories. For example, we are developing leaf level and the campus level, light, reaction, light and carbon balanced the reaction for photos and models, and put that into global models and map that into try to map these very complex processes into these mathematical terms, and also finally into the questions to be put into the global systems.
Ying Sun: So the research of philosophy is like, we. We really need to harness the data and the theory in order to advance the science and understanding and applications. One
Ying Sun: and another key point is like it's all about scaling from in time, and also in space. For example, from the modeling perspective we try to incorporate to the molecular level process of photosynthesis is still to a diffusion into global models, and to make these global maps and look at the time serious
Ying Sun: from the data perspective. Look at this one. We're utilizing chlorophyll fluorescence as example, this molecular level processes
Ying Sun: it's actually can be monitored right now from the space by by space for data here.
Ying Sun: So this is my an Sf. A. Macro System ecology project. Try to understand that the chloral feel fluorescent, and it's a relationship. So with the photosynthesis from the leaf to the content. And again, here we try to harness data, and also, sir, and pull that into different models. So we develop a database at the corner of Botanica Garda in collaboration with honest scientists across the world to develop a leaf level database, and then try to put that into models and validate that with a neon observation
at a cannabis scale, and then that finalists to go with up to Continental and the global scale.
Ying Sun: So this is the outcome. These 2 papers, or just a a published last month in global chain biology. This these are the you did the reviews. So I tried to talk about the theory and the data on how the satellite, remote sensing of Sif can be utilized to in for ecosystem structure function and the services.
Ying Sun: Finally, I would like to acknowledge my team who are highly protective and hard working. Yeah, thank you. That's all I have for today.
Laurie Anderson: Thank you very much. I'm so glad you talked about that paper by Bonan from 2,008. I love that paper. That's it. That's one of my favorites. So thank you for for focusing on that.
Laurie Anderson: Yeah, all right. We have one final speaker, and then we'll proceed to some breakout rooms. so I will now introduce Dr. Jennifer Cotton
Laurie Anderson: from California State University, Northridge.
Laurie Anderson: Dr. Cotton Uses stable isotopes and other geochemical proxies to study how the terrestrial climate and environment has changed through many different timescales.
Laurie Anderson: A current collaborative project focuses on how small mammals can signal changes in urbanization, hydrology, and deforestation through time.
Laurie Anderson: Jen, please go ahead.
Laurie Anderson: Jen. We can't hear you. If
Laurie Anderson: if you're speaking we can see your screen now.
Jennifer Cotton: Sorry forgot to hit on mute.
Jennifer Cotton: Let's try that again.
Jennifer Cotton: Okay. So thanks for the introduction. And today i'm going to talk to you about my recently ended
Jennifer Cotton: Macro Systems Biology project
Jennifer Cotton: entitled My Escapes using small mammal isotopes to understand the impact of land use and landscape change on the West Coast
Jennifer Cotton: over the past 100 years.
Jennifer Cotton: Okay. So the motivation for this project is that we've got a climate and environmental change that have been occurring over the last 150 years.
Jennifer Cotton: And so you're all familiar with a map that looks something like this where we're looking at the the temperature change of the last 100 years the West coast has seen.
Jennifer Cotton: or the western half of the country has seen, more of that temperature change than other parts of the country.
Jennifer Cotton: and also population has been in increasing. There's been dramatic environmental change over much of the country, and that this presents really significant challenges for maintaining biodiversity and ecosystem function in the future.
Jennifer Cotton: So the AIM of this project is to better understand the impact of these changes in in regions across the country, and we are using small mammals as recorders of that environmental change over the past 100 years.
Jennifer Cotton: Okay. So why am I interested in looking at small mammals as recorders of environmental change. Small mammals are well actually to take a step back. I just want to.
Jennifer Cotton: We have a little bit of background about me. So I did my undergraduate degree in chemistry.
Jennifer Cotton: And then I got really interested in geochemistry and went and did a. Ph. D. In an Earth and Environmental Sciences department. And My focus is on stable isotope, geochemistry, actually as a tool to reconstruct climate and environmental change
Jennifer Cotton: over millions of years. So i'm, actually I'm in a geology department, and I'm. A kind of a paleo climate paleo environmental person.
Jennifer Cotton: So my ultimate
Jennifer Cotton: AIM here was to be able to use small males in the fossil record as indicators of climate change in the past. But the idea here is that there's been a lot of work on large mammals, you know, in order to understand what aspects of the environment
Jennifer Cotton: the large mammals are recording in the is topic compositions of their tissues. But there's been little work to try to understand
Jennifer Cotton: what aspects of the environment the small mammals are recording in their tissues, and
Jennifer Cotton: small mammals are more abundant in the fossil record.
Jennifer Cotton: So if we can get a better understanding of what aspects of the environment the small mammals might be recording in their tissues. Then we have a much larger sample size in the fossil record to go back and to be able to reconstruct environment and climate over a much longer period of time.
Jennifer Cotton: Okay. So in this study we're focused on paramiscus maniculatus, which is the North American Deer Mouse, which is a widely distributed small mammal across the United States, or actually all almost all of North America. They have a generalist diet, so we think that they're eating
Jennifer Cotton: most stuff. They also have a small home range, so we think that they could be good indicators of local scale changes in habitat as opposed to larger mammals, which kind of bulldoz a much larger area, incorporating an averaging signal into their their diet of a much larger region.
Jennifer Cotton: I don't have a lot of time today to talk about isotopes in the background behind that. But if you're unfamiliar with how stabilized to biogeochemistry works. Essentially you are what you eat.
Jennifer Cotton: and the isotopic composition of your hair and your teeth and your bones is reflective of your diet.
Jennifer Cotton: and this particular slide is is kind of explaining how it works with carbon isotopes. But we were looking at a wide range of different isotope systems here. So carbon, nitrogen, oxygen, and hydrogen.
Jennifer Cotton: But for carbon isotopes you basically can look at the difference between C 3 and C. 4 plant resources in a particular animals
Jennifer Cotton: diet. There is some fractionation or or additional separation of isotopes as you go from the plant to the the animal, but that's generally has been constrained.
Jennifer Cotton: Okay. And so this project had a kind of cute title called My so escapes. So what is a mys escape?
Jennifer Cotton: Well, a mice escape is
Jennifer Cotton: a form of a isoscape and an isoscape is an isotope landscape model.
Jennifer Cotton: So
Jennifer Cotton: I was after I finished my Phd. I went on to get a or to do a postdoc.
Jennifer Cotton: and the postdoc project that I was on was one of the original Macro Systems biology proposals that was funded in 2,012,
Jennifer Cotton: and the idea behind
Jennifer Cotton: that was continental scale. Isotope ecology to make is escapes for different regions across the world.
Jennifer Cotton: and the project that I worked on initially, was looking at Bison. and so we were doing bison isotope
Jennifer Cotton: measurements across North America. So that's what this figure is showing here. The dots are showing all of the different locations which we had measurements of the ice topic, composition of bison, hair, or tooth, enamel or bone collagen.
Jennifer Cotton: And then we correlated that with climate and environmental variables to make, come up with a predictive model to predict what the isotopic composition of of a bison living anywhere across in in the grasslands across North America should be, which is related to
Jennifer Cotton: their diet. So it's basically giving us a map of C 3 and C 4 plant distributions.
Jennifer Cotton: I the Isiscape using bison. I called that a bice escape.
Jennifer Cotton: and so I say, a My escape is a Isotope landscape model, using mice.
Jennifer Cotton: Our study area for this project was the west coast of the United States. So, looking at Southern California and also the Pacific Northwest in Southern California, we're targeting landscape change due to urbanization, and also
Jennifer Cotton: potentially, if we could pick up any of those.
Jennifer Cotton: the climate changes over the last 100 years, and in the Pacific Northwest we're interested in looking at deforestation.
Jennifer Cotton: and if we could pick up on signals of of of deforestation in our in our samples, the figure here on the right is showing the the samples that we have across these regions, and where these samples actually came from
Jennifer Cotton: they came from museums. So museums are a really under utilized resource in terms of being able to check out
Jennifer Cotton: the
Jennifer Cotton: You know geochemical signatures of animals through time, because lot of these museums have been collecting samples from the 1880 S. To present.
Jennifer Cotton: So we looked at 9 different museums. We got like 500 samples of peramiscus manipulators. We give them little haircuts. We took a little bit of that hair back to the lab. We grounded up and processed it for at, for I step analyses.
Jennifer Cotton: Okay. We also use samples from Neon.
Jennifer Cotton: and the idea here was to get at modern sampling over a wider distribution, to try to look at like how we can get like continental scale variability in our in our samples.
Jennifer Cotton: and then from there to make our Iso escapes, we We combined
Jennifer Cotton: the isotope data, climate data and geographic variables with
Jennifer Cotton: with a random forest analysis, and it basically came up with a predictive model to apply
Jennifer Cotton: the a. A prediction for the ice topic composition across the landscape
Jennifer Cotton: just a really brief bit about our results.
Jennifer Cotton: It
Jennifer Cotton: We are are seeing that what appears to be
Jennifer Cotton: an influence and population density in Southern California
Jennifer Cotton: through time. So in areas where the population density is above 60,
Jennifer Cotton: 60 people per kilometer through time, there's an increase in the variability of the I stop the composition of our
Jennifer Cotton: our of our small mammals.
Jennifer Cotton: potentially rated, related to a increase in.
Jennifer Cotton: you know, different food sources to your organization.
Jennifer Cotton: And then in this is just an example of one of our like a zoom in of one of our is escapes. This is the hydrogen. Isis is escape. Again, I don't have a time to talk about exactly what that like, how we make this, or how or what this all means. But ultimately hydrogen isotopes.
Jennifer Cotton: our recorders and hydrologic cycle. And what we think we're seeing here is changes through time due to the importation of water to Southern California, coming in from the Colorado River and from the Eastern Sierras. So we we
Jennifer Cotton: import tons of water to Southern California that gets then gets used for irrigation, and we think that the small mammals are actually picking up on that.
Jennifer Cotton: Okay? So this was a this award was.
Jennifer Cotton: I'm not sure that Macro system. Biology is even doing this this type of award anymore, but it was an early career. Award it where I was the pi. It was limited to $300,000 per year, or $300,000 total over 2 years, and
Jennifer Cotton: we had some challenges with this project because of that, and i'm happy to talk about that more in the
Jennifer Cotton: in the breakout sessions, but essentially being
Jennifer Cotton: mit ctl, and a a limited amount of money, it wasn't enough money to really fund a postdoc for long enough to help with this project, and being at a 100
Jennifer Cotton: small institution with no Phd students. the
Jennifer Cotton: there were some challenges in getting this work done that had really slowed us down. And so, you know the collaborators here also. The 2 of these were were postdocs who worked on the project for only a small amount of time, moved around a couple of times to different institutions before securing 100 and
Jennifer Cotton: permanent positions, and so, but their time that they could work on. This was limited, and so a lot of this kind of fell on my shoulders.
Jennifer Cotton: more so than I was kind of expecting to, and then, being at a small institution.
Jennifer Cotton: It's been really challenging to pull this off. So you know, just advice if you're getting involved with this kind of work, is that to be sure that you choose your collaborators. Why, why wisely, and that they can fully commit to the time necessary to complete the project.
Jennifer Cotton: and that if you can make sure that your postdocs have enough money enough funding that they don't have to be
Jennifer Cotton: constantly concerned with where their next job is going to come from, so that they can actually be more productive.
Jennifer Cotton: All right. thank you.
Laurie Anderson: Thanks, Jennifer, and it, I think it's really important to acknowledge the challenges of this work, so I appreciate you sharing that with us.
Laurie Anderson: So now I think we'll be guided in the next step.
Matt Heard: All right, hey? Everyone just want to say Thank you.
Laurie Anderson: So so we're back. I don't know about you all. But we had an excellent discussion in my breakout room. It was very productive. Great ideas for what me if I can do next, I think.
Laurie Anderson: and i'd like to now go to our ending
Laurie Anderson: an ending call for a little help from you all
Laurie Anderson: as we move to our next steps. So let me just make sure that my slides are set up. I'm just gonna show you one slide.
Laurie Anderson: skip down to my last slide.
Laurie Anderson: So we
Laurie Anderson: this is. This is one of many events, and the Nefa network is continuing over 5 years to work on questions of macro systems, ecology, and focused on getting teaching, teaching oriented faculty to engage with Macro systems ecology.
Laurie Anderson: So we're hoping that this is our just our first step in our first engagement with you we have another virtual event structured very similarly to this one on Tuesday, April fourth, that people can register for and join us to talk more specifically about macro systems data sets.
Laurie Anderson: We're also going to put in the chat, a pull on data sets that will help us shape that next event.
Laurie Anderson: and you can take a look at that. I think it just opened so you can go ahead and
Laurie Anderson: respond.
Laurie Anderson: Are we good?
Laurie Anderson: Okay.
Laurie Anderson: I also want to mention that
Laurie Anderson: we are having a summer in-person meeting. It will actually have both in person and virtual options for attendance. The in-person attendance will be supported by significant travel funding from the Nsf.
Laurie Anderson: And this will take place July 20 Fifth through the twenty-seventh at Swarthmore College, in Philadelphia we will have an application form, and we will be making some selections to try to make sure we get
Laurie Anderson: a wide range of participants in the in-person component.
Laurie Anderson: And, as I said, there'll be a virtual option as well. So look for that application to be distributed to our ecological community. In April also, we have a post event survey that appears in the chat, and we'd like to ask you to take a few minutes before the official end of our event
Laurie Anderson: and fill that out.
Laurie Anderson: And also to you. Think about visiting our website and joining me, for this is free, and you would simply be able to get.
Laurie Anderson: you know emails from us updates on our events.
Laurie Anderson: This will be the community that will focus a lot of our outreach and and mentorship to you.
Laurie Anderson: So if you're interested. Please join me, for we welcome lurkers if you're like. Well, i'm not sure if I have time. The answer is, you have time to work. Just just sign up, and maybe in a month or 2 months or 6 months you'll be ready to work with us, so please feel free to join.
Laurie Anderson: And, by the way, if you're coming to us from Aaron, feel free to join me for and maintain your membership in Aaron as well, both are free, and both are.
Laurie Anderson: you know, complementary networks that are that are overlapping.
Laurie Anderson: So i'll let you all work on the survey, Matt. Is there anything else
Matt Heard: you'd like to say as people are working on the survey. No, just we want to thank you all so much for your time and your participation. We recognize that it can be daunting to start new projects, especially right now. But for everybody who has been a part of Aaron for really long time, and it's been a part of me, for I think we've just gotten so much out of the collaborative efforts we've done, and
Matt Heard: we've really appreciated how much these networks have helped advance our careers, so we hope that you enjoy it. And please feel free to reach out to any of us with any questions that you've got. We're more than happy to chat with you about this Grant, moving forward and thank you again to our speakers. It's really great, having you all here, and to hear all about your work
Matt Heard: in the world of macro systems and your different approaches to it. So thank you.
Laurie Anderson: Yes. I will want to add my thanks to the speakers as well, really wonderful presentations, very interesting research. I'm excited to learn more about your projects and thank you for your expertise
Laurie Anderson: so.
Laurie Anderson: and we'll just keep keep things open, and as people will fill out the surveys for us, that's very helpful in shaping our events for the future.
Laurie Anderson: We'll go from there.
Wendi JW Williams: Okay, Thank you for this session. Bye, Everybody.