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2014 Year in Review

· 6 min read
Mike Dietze
Mike Dietze
PEcAn Project PI

A roundup of PEcAn project activities and highlights from 2014.

The project continued to grow through major conference activity, software development, publications, and related cyberinfrastructure efforts such as Brown Dog.

Major Conferences​

Presentations at AGU Fall Meeting 2014 (December 2014)​

The PEcAn team presented the following at the 2014 Fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco:

  • B13C-0202 "The PEcAn Project: Accessible Tools for On-demand Ecosystem Modeling" (Poster)
  • B13C-0192 "Constraining carbon budgets at a regional scale: fusing forest inventory data with a cohort-based biosphere model" (Poster)
  • B13C-0198 "A Hierarchical Analysis of Tree Growth and Environmental Drivers Across Eastern US Temperate Forests" (Poster)
  • B52A-04 "Caught in the flux net: disentangling error, uncertainty, heterogeneity, and spatial process in biogeochemical scaling" (Invited Talk)
  • B51G-0101 "Scaling Forest Management Practices in Earth System Models: Case Study of Southeast and Pacific Northwest Forests" (Poster)
  • B53D-0218 "Measured and modelled carbon and water fluxes in hybrid willows grown for biofuel production" (Poster)
  • B53I-07 "Integrating satellite and tower phenology: a case-study in real-time ecological forecasting" (Talk)

PEcAn Team at ESA 2014 (August 2014)​

David LeBauer presented "Combining heterogeneous data and process understanding using the Predictive Ecosystem Analyzer" on Wednesday, August 13, 2014 in Symposium 11: Challenges and Advances in Statistical Software For Ecology. Shawn Serbin and Mike Dietze were co-authors.

Mike Dietze also presented "Predicting phenology: A case-study in real-time ecological forecasting" on Monday, August 11, 2014 in Organized Oral Session 4: The National Ecological Observatory (NEON): Opportunities and models for building synergistic partnerships with the community to advance continental scale ecology.

Workshops and Training​

COST PROFOUND 2014 (November 11-13, 2014)​

Mike Dietze gave the keynote address, "Models and Data", at the inaugural meeting of PROFOUND (FP 1304 Towards robust projections of European forests under climate change), a new EU COST Action.

Mike participated in several COST PROFOUND working groups and task groups. In particular, Mike Dietze and David Cameron (UK) co-organized Task Group 15 - Statistical problems in fitting models to heterogeneous data.

Brown Dog Early User Workshop (July 22, 2014)​

Kenton McHenry (Brown Dog PI, PEcAn co-PI) hosted the Brown Dog Early User Workshop from July 22-23, 2014 at NCSA in Urbana, Illinois.

Mike Dietze (PEcAn PI, Brown Dog co-PI) gave a presentation (pdf, YouTube) on how Brown Dog will be used to access and harmonize vegetation and meteorological data, and how it will be incorporated into PEcAn.

Rob Kooper (NCSA Senior Programmer on both Brown Dog and PEcAn) presented on how Brown Dog will interact with other NSF computational resources. David LeBauer (PEcAn) presented a lightning talk on how Brown Dog might benefit BETYdb.

PEcAn Summer Courses 2014 (August 2014)​

Hands-on tutorials on using PEcAn were presented at the 2014 editions of the Niwot Ridge Flux Course and the PalEON summer course Assimilating Long Term Data into Ecosystem Models.

PEcAn Seminar for Harvard Forest REU program (July 2, 2014)​

Mike Dietze was invited back to the Harvard Forest Summer REU program to present an evening seminar "The PEcAn Project: Carbon-Cycle Reanalysis Facilitated by Model-Data Ecoinformatics".

Seminars and Invited Talks​

PEcAn seminar at Columbia University (October 7, 2014)​

Mike Dietze gave a seminar "The PEcAn Project: A Community Platform for Synthesis & Forecasting of Ecosystems" in the Department of Ecology, Evolution & Environmental Biology (E3B) at Columbia University.

PEcAn Workshop and Seminar at Kent State (September 26, 2014)​

Mike Dietze gave a seminar in the Biology Department at Kent State titled "Terrestrial Ecosystems: Past, Present, & Future". While at Kent, Mike also ran a two-hour PEcAn workshop for departmental grad students and faculty.

Dietze Tenure Talk (September 22, 2014)​

Mike Dietze presented his tenure seminar "Terrestrial Ecosystems: Past, Present, & Future" to the Department of Earth and Environment at Boston University. This talk focused on the PalEON and PEcAn projects and laid out the vision for PEcAn's future direction.

Grants and Proposals​

PEcAn 2 Proposal Submitted (August 12, 2014)​

Mike Dietze, Ankur Desai, and Kenton McHenry submitted the PEcAn renewal proposal "Collaborative Research: ABI Development: The PEcAn Project: A Community Platform for Ecological Forecasting" to the NSF program Advances in Biological Informatics (ABI).

The PEcAn 2 proposal focuses on three additional challenges:

  1. The need for a scalable solution to improving models, both in the cyberinfrastructure and the involvement of the research community
  2. The need to assess, track, and analyze model skill, structure, and uncertainty
  3. The need to increase the accessibility of modeling tools

Publications​

Concepts paper on ecological forecasting (May 2014)​

Niu S, Y Luo, M Dietze, T Keenan, Z Shi, J Li, FS Chapin III. 2014. The role of data assimilation in predictive ecology. Ecosphere 5:art65. https://doi.org/10.1890/ES13-00273.1

PEcAn synthesis paper across North America (March 19, 2014)​

Dietze M, S Serbin, C Davidson, A Desai, X Feng, R Kelly, R Kooper, D LeBauer, J Mantooth, K McHenry, D Wang. 2014. A quantitative assessment of a terrestrial biosphere model's data needs across North American biomes. Journal of Geophysical Research Biogeosciences DOI: 10.1002/2013JG002392 link

Dietze paper on modeling photosynthesis (February 2014)​

Dietze M. 2013. Gaps in knowledge and data driving uncertainty in models of photosynthesis. Photosynthesis Research 19:3-14 DOI: 10.1007/s11120-013-9836-z

Workshops Hosted​

LeBauer hosts forecasting software workshop (February 2014)​

FORECAST RCN workshop, "Advancing Software for Ecological Forecasting", March 25-27 2014, Urbana, IL. Meeting webpage. Mike Dietze was also in attendance.

Meetings and Other Events​

New Phytologist meeting on modeling photosynthesis (April 22-25, 2014)​

Mike Dietze participated in the New Phytologist workshop "Improving Representation of Photosynthesis in Earth System Models" in Montauk, NY organized by Alistair Rogers, Belinda Medlyn, and Jeff Dukes. Mike presented on how PEcAn can help constrain photosynthetic traits in Earth System Models and assess the uncertainty in model projections. A meeting report was published in New Phytologist and can be found here.

Sunny Feng defends PhD (April 8, 2014)​

Xiaohui "Sunny" Feng successfully defended her PhD dissertation "PRODUCTIVITY, PHYSIOLOGY, COMMUNITY DYNAMICS, AND ECOLOGICAL IMPACTS OF A GRASSLAND AGRO-ECOSYSTEM" at the University of Illinois, Urbana-Champaign.

Software Releases​

PEcAn 1.3.6 Released (July 28, 2014)​

This version focused on more database updates, including improved site/data management and support for meteorology conversion from netCDF CF standard to SipNET's .clim driver files.

PEcAn 1.3.5 Released (May 2014)​

Major update switching to PostgreSQL, enabling distributed instances of BETYdb and maintaining local database changes. This enabled multiple installations to run BETYdb and exchange local changes across databases.