zhuwpadmin

Major NSF grant supports research on soil fungi Climate change will bring changes to fungi and tree distribution, possibly soil From UC Santa Cruz News September 03, 2019 By Jennifer McNulty Soil fungi are the quiet, underground workhorses of virtually every ecosystem from the tropics to Antarctica. Yet little is known about their prevalence, distribution, or how they might respond to climate change and other ecological disturbances. Kai Zhu, an assistant professor of environmental [...]

The first lab retreat started at Swanton's Farm Stand and U-Pick in Davenport, where lab members, family, and partners picked berries and sat down for a nice picnic lunch. We all enjoyed our strawberry hauls on a beautiful Saturday.

Clara attended the Summer Course on "Ecological Forecasting" at Boston University, Boston, Massachusetts, July 28 – August 2, 2019. From the workshop website: NEFI 2019 Summer Course As part of the NSF-funded Near-term Ecological Forecasting Initiative, this course targets graduate students, post-docs, and early-career scientists interested in learning about ecological forecasting in a variety of contexts. In addition to academics, we reserve slots specifically for agency and NGO scientists. This course is adapted from the recently [...]

Kai attended the Investigative Workshop "Transients in Biological Systems: Implications and Detection" in National Institute for Mathematical and Biological Synthesis (NIMBioS) at the University of Tennessee, Knoxville, Tennessee, May 29-31, 2019. Great to meet an interdisciplinary team of biologists, mathematicians, and statisticians. From the workshop website: Organizers: Alan Hastings, Environmental Science and Policy, Univ. of California, Davis Carl Boettiger, Environmental Science, Policy, and Management, Univ. of California, Berkeley Kim Cuddington, Biology, Univ. of Waterloo, [...]

Yiluan attended the Training Course on "New Advances in Land Carbon Cycle Modeling" at Northern Arizona University, Flagstaff, Arizona, May 13-24, 2019. From the workshop website: Who should attend? Modelers who want to gain simplicity in coding, diagnostic capability, computational efficiency, and data constraints for your models Empiricists who want to use your data to constrain models toward ecological forecasting Graduate students, post-docs and young scientists who want to learn modeling, data assimilation, and [...]

On Apr 26, 2019, Yiluan presented a talk Are plants keeping up with the climate? at the 15th Annual Graduate Research Symposium and won the award for the Best in Social Sciences Division. https://graddiv.ucsc.edu/events/symposium/index.html Yiluan also won the Hammett Fellowship in 2019. https://socialsciences.ucsc.edu/support-us/awards/student-profiles/2019-profiles/yiluan-song.html Congratulations, Yiluan!

Kai is awarded a Faculty Research Grant from the Committee of Research at UC Santa Cruz for 2019-2020. The research topic is to examine plant phenology change in response to climate change in northern high latitudes over three decades.

Yiluan's meta-analysis paper is selected as the Editor's Choice in Oikos. Song, Y. , Liew, J. H., Sim, D. Z., Mowe, M. A., Mitrovic, S. M., Tan, H. T. and Yeo, D. C. (2019), Effects of macrophytes on lake‐water quality across latitudes: a meta‐analysis. Oikos, 128: 468-481. doi:10.1111/oik.05809 Congratulations, Yiluan!

Kai, Yiluan, and Clara published a commentary in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS). The commentary introduces a new study by Pugh et al. on global forest age and carbon sink, pointing out new research directions in forest demography and carbon sequestration. Zhu K, Song Y, Qin C. (2019). Forest age improves understanding of the global carbon sink. Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences. https://doi.org/10.1073/pnas.1900797116 Figure. History of changing forests in New [...]

Kai is invited to give a seminar talk at the University of Georgia, Odum School of Ecology. Great to see many colleagues and students doing fascinating works!