Grand Challenges: Drought and the Global Carbon Cycle
How are trees like stock market players? In this effort supported by Princeton’s Grand Challenges program, we investigate the disparity between leaf-level models of water usage and community-level models, where trees compete for a common pool.
UFOs: Ubiquitous Forest Observations
In collaboration with Kelly Caylor we are developing radically-affordable environmental sensing pods that are connected by the cellular network to the global internet.
Russell Ranch Deployment
We had a great visit to UC Davis’s Russell Ranch, home of the LTRAS experiment. The PI’s were Lyndon Estes (Princeton) and Darren Drewry (JPL), … Continue reading
PulsePod Production Ramps Up
May was a busy month getting the circuit boards etched and assembled, waterjetting the aluminum brackets, laser cutting the gaskets, injection molding tooling for sensor … Continue reading
NASA & NSF Awards on African Agriculture
We are very happy to have been awarded new grants from both NSF and NASA! The NSF grant falls under the Water, Sustainability, and Climate program, which selected our proposal to study the “Impacts of Agricultural Decision Making and Adaptive Management on Food Security in Africa”.
Elliot Chang awarded Smith Newton Scholar
Chang’s research will focus on developing more accurate measurements in isotopic analysis through the use of cleaner distillates (without organic contamination). Through this process, his goal is to improve the ability to predict the impact of climate change on tree survival.
ESA Symposium: Cumulative Impacts on Species Range Shifts
Malin Pinsky, Morgan Tingley, and I are organizing the ESA Symposium “Climate and Beyond: Cumulative Impacts on Species Range Shifts”, to be held in Sacramento August 11-15
NSF Macrosystems: Extreme events and ecological acclimation: Scaling from cells to ecosystems
The National Science Foundation has funded a collaborative research project to consider the consequences of drought on individual tissues, on whole trees, in populations, and ecosystem fluxes.
JPL: Rapid forest triage using quadcopter drones
In collaboration with Roland Brockers at JPL and Kelly Caylor of Princeton CEE, we were funded to develop capabilities to use a small quadrotor UAV that … Continue reading
Oxford Megafauna Conference
Megafauna and Ecosystem Function: from the Pleistocene to the Anthropocene Conference at the University of Oxford, 18 – 20 March 2014 Oxford University’s Ecosystems Research … Continue reading
AGU 2013 Fall Meeting
Good turnout for the special session “Drought Postmortem 2012”, and happy to present a poster on our drought modeling work “Implementation of diverse tree hydraulics in a land surface model”
Makerbot Interview
An interview with Makerbot Stories, discussing 3D printing our PULSE – pods
Animal extinctions and the dawn of civilization
Congrats to Chris Doughty who adapted our herbivore-mediated nutrient diffusion model to consider the effects of herbivore extinction on the development of early civilization!
STRATA: Big Data
On October 29, 2013 Adam and Kelly Caylor gave a talk at the Strata NYC conference, “Drought Prediction and Ecological Monitoring with the Internet of Things.” … Continue reading
Jackie’s interview with Princeton News
Jackie Jones was a summer research intern, taking the lead in gas exchange measurements of tree species at Silas Little.
Herbivore diffusion
A pair of papers by myself, Chris Doughty and Yadvinder Malhi on the capacity for herbivores to spread nutrients over large spatial and temporal timescales.