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UC Santa Cruz News Forest monitoring efforts contribute to new understanding of climate change impacts February 25, 2021 By Allison Arteaga Soergel The Forest Ecology Research Plot, part of the UCSC Campus Natural Reserve, includes about 31,000 tagged plants monitored by student interns. Photo by Cody Perhamus. Data collected by student interns at UC Santa Cruz’s Forest Ecology Research Plot (FERP) recently contributed to a breakthrough in understanding how climate change affects forests. A new [...]

Clara was featured on the Ecological Society of America's (ESA) blog as a 2020 NEON-ESA Early Career Scholar. This program supports early-career scientists in attending the ESA Annual Meeting and a pre-conference meet-and-greet where they can connect with peers. The theme of the 2020 Annual Meeting was "Harnessing the Ecological Data Revolution" – which made it an ideal venue for learning to leverage large datasets such as those available from the National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON). [...]

A team led by Yiluan Song and advised by Kai Zhu received the Tech for Social Good Program Award, funded by CITRIS and the Banatao Institute in partnership with UCSC Institute for Social Transformation. In a six-month project, the team seeks to enhance climate change education through personalized scientific communications on phenology. This award will enable the team to assimilate crowdsourced phenology observations into data-driven phenology models, provide customized information on climate-phenology coupling, and encourage [...]

UC Santa Cruz News Quantitative ecologist wins Tansley Medal for plant science contributions November 04, 2020 By Allison Arteaga Soergel Kai Zhu joined the UC Santa Cruz faculty in 2017 and is now an assistant professor in the Environmental Studies Department.  From a global field of applicants, environmental studies assistant professor Kai Zhu was recently chosen as one of two honorees to receive the Tansley Medal for Excellence in Plant Science. This annual award, presented by [...]

The lab presented at the Ecological Society of America (ESA) 2020 Virtual Annual Meeting. Clara Qin Combining continental-scale sampling networks to uncover the rules of fungal community assembly Abstract link Yiluan Song Keeping up with climate: Phenology in the Anthropocene Abstract link Kai Zhu Latitudinal patterns of climate tracking in montane plants and animals Abstract link

Kai is awarded a Faculty Research Grant from the Committee of Research at UC Santa Cruz for 2020-2021. The research topic is to forecast plant pollen phenology by integrating remotely-sensed and ground-based data.

Kai Zhu, Steve Munch, and Yiluan Song were awarded the Microsoft AI for Earth Azure compute credit grant of $15,000. In a one-year project, the team aims to forecast pollen levels with data-driven phenology models. Microsoft Azure's wide array of cloud computing services will enable the team to decipher the complex dynamics of plant phenology and make scalable predictions to inform public health decisions under climate change. (Photo credit: Microsoft.)

An article by Clara, Kai, and collaborators at Stanford University was selected as editor's choice in the Journal of Ecology. The print version of the issue, published today, also features a photo of the study site during a 2011 prescribed burn – the same treatment which helped the authors to conclude that climate change affects grassland soil microbial communities primarily through the legacy effects of fire and shifts in plant community composition. Co-authors Nona Chiariello [...]

Lan Liu, a former postdoc, published a meta-analysis paper on plant-soil diversity in ESA journal Ecosphere. Liu L, Zhu K, Wurzburger N, Zhang J. Relationships between plant diversity and soil microbial diversity vary across taxonomic groups and spatial scales. Ecosphere, 11(1):e02999. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.2999 Abstract Plant diversity has long been assumed to predict soil microbial diversity. However, contradictory results have been found when examining their relationships, particularly at broad spatial scales. To address this issue, we conducted a [...]

Yiluan Song presented her poster "Keeping up with climate: phenology in the Anthropocene" at the American Geophysical Union (AGU) Fall Meeting 2019 (Centennial) in the session "Understanding Phenological Responses and Feedbacks in Terrestrial Vegetation: Patterns, Mechanisms, and Consequences." Abstract link here.