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From NEON blog Want a Faster Way to Process Microbial DNA data? Try the neonMicrobe R Package February 17, 2022 Microbial DNA sequencing data from the NEON terrestrial field sites are freely available on the NEON Data Portal—but extracting useful information from all that data can be daunting for ecologists without a bioinformatics background. Thanks to the neonMicrobeR package, researchers can now automate much of the work of downloading, processing, and assembling microbial data from NEON terrestrial [...]

As a recent Tansley Medal winner, Kai gave an invited talk for New Phytologist Now. Understanding forest dynamics by integrating age and environmental change  Held on 9th December 2021. Kai is a global ecologist and quantitative environmental whose work integrates ecological theory with advanced statistical and computing science tools to study the impact of global change on plants. His current research focuses on plant and soil responses to environmental change, both spatially and temporally. [...]

From EOS, Science News by AGU The Flowers that Bloom in the Spring (but Later) Mismatch between the pace of climate change and crop phenology may signal a new challenge for climate change adaptation. by David S. Schimel, 31 December 2021   Changes to phenology, the timing of biological events, are among the sharpest diagnostics of climate change. Indeed, one of the longest records of plant phenology has been kept by the Spanish Meteorological Agency (AEMET) [...]

Clara Qin and Yiluan Song presented their posters at the AGU Fall Meeting 2021 in New Orleans, LA 13-17 December 2021. Here are the links to their online posters. Climatic niche modeling reveals convergent responses across soil fungal guilds link Novel prediction-based framework and machine learning model for quantifying phenological mismatch during climate change link Ecological forecasting of leafing and flowering phenology during climate change to inform public health link

From CyVerse https://cyverse.org/foundational-friendships-lead-to-open-ecological-science Foundational Friendships Lead to Open Ecological Science A group of researchers met in a CyVerse open science class and created a novel tool for ecologists to analyze microbial datasets. By Shelley Littin, CyVerse Software developers craft the tools of modern science, and CyVerse provides the collaboration space where they can get creative, connect with end users, and publish their products. One such collaboration led to an open source software tool for ecologists everywhere, [...]

From UC Santa Cruz News New study shows plants struggle to keep pace with climate change in human-dominated landscapes December 06, 2021 By Allison Arteaga Soergel Researchers found that changes in plant phenology are lagging behind rising temperatures across a majority of the Northern Hemisphere, particularly in the most human-dominated landscapes, like crop lands. Researchers at UC Santa Cruz are contributing new insights into the challenges plants face in adapting to climate change. Prior research [...]

Yiluan Song participated in the ESA-SEEDS Interdisciplinary Power of Data Workshop in Baltimore, Maryland. Over five days, graduate students and early career ecologists from diverse underrepresented groups learned about and explored opportunities for collaborative research using big data in ecology.

Yiluan received the E.C. Pielou Award from the Ecological Society of America (ESA) with her oral presentation "Novel data-driven method to model the nonlinear dynamics of leafing phenology" at the 2021 ESA Annual Meeting. The E.C. Pielou Award is given to graduate student(s) for their scientific contribution to statistical ecology. https://www.esa.org/stats/awards/e-c-pielou-award/   Congratulations, Yiluan!

Kai, together with Katia Obraczka (Computer Science and Engineering) and Ricardo Sanfelice (Electrical and Computer Engineering), received a $40,000 campus seed fund from the Center for Information Technology Research in the Interest of Society (CITRIS). The project focuses on wildfire risk assessment by developing a decision support tool with a drone-assisted IoT (Internet of Things) monitoring network. https://citris.sites.ucsc.edu/funded-projects/ EUREKA: A Decision Support Tool for Wildfire Risk Assessment Using a Drone-Assisted, Scalable and Efficient UAV-Assisted IoT [...]

Quantitative ecologist Kai Zhu wins NSF funding for climate change research and education UC Santa Cruz News July 02, 2021 By Allison Arteaga Soergel SHARE THIS STORY:TwitterFacebookLinkedInReddit Associate Professor of Environmental Studies Kai Zhu specializes in research that combines traditional ecology methods with cutting-edge data science tools. Changes in plant phenology—like earlier emergence of flowers and leaves in the spring—are a more easily observable impact of rising global average temperatures. Photo: Carolyn Lagattuta  Associate Professor of [...]