2018 LTER All Scientists' Meeting

8:30-8:40 Brief Announcements

8:40-9:20 a.m.
Sharon Collinge, National Ecological Observatory Network, Director and Chief Scientist
Sharon Collinge was named Director and Chief Scientist at NEON in early 2018. She is a professor and former director of the Environmental Studies Program at the University of Colorado Boulder. Sharon’s professional expertise centers on how landscape change affects the survival and persistence of native plants and animals. Her current research focuses on the use of ecological theory to guide efforts to conserve and restore vernal pool ecosystems in California. At CU-Boulder, Sharon has taught courses in Conservation Biology, Food and the Environment, Disease Ecology, and Restoration Ecology. Sharon earned a doctorate in landscape ecology from Harvard University in 1995, and in 1998 she became an assistant professor of biology and environmental studies at the University of Colorado-Boulder. Sharon was named a 2004 Aldo Leopold Leadership Fellow in recognition of her outstanding leadership ability and desire to communicate scientific issues beyond academic audiences, and was elected as the Ecological Society of America’s Vice President for Public Affairs in 2011.

9:20-10:00 a.m.
Michael Dietze, Boston University, Associate Professor, Department of Earth and Environment
Michael Dietze leads the Ecological Forecasting Laboratory at Boston University, whose mission is to better understand and predict ecological systems, and is author of the book “Ecological Forecasting”. He is interested in the ways that iterative forecasts, which are continually confronted with new data, can improve and accelerate basic science in ecology, while at the same time making that science more directly relevant to society. Much of the current work in the lab is organized within the Near-term Ecological Forecasting Initiative (NEFI) and the PEcAn project. NEFI is focused on addressing overarching questions about ecological predictability, while developing forecasts for a wide range of ecological processes (vegetation phenology and land-surface fluxes; ticks, tick-borne disease and small mammal hosts; soil microbiome; aquatic productivity and algal blooms) and advancing statistical and informatic tools for ecological forecasting. PEcAn is focused on the terrestrial carbon cycle, improving our capacity for carbon MRV (monitoring, reporting, verification), forecasting, data assimilation, and multi-model benchmarking and calibration within the land component of Earth System models.