Yiluan Song was admitted into the 2023 Cohort of the Eric and Wendy Schmidt AI in Science Postdoctoral Fellowship Program. This program is hosted at the Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS) at the University of Michigan. She will be working on a Bayesian process-guided machine learning framework to project nature’s calendar under climate change, advised by Dr. Kai Zhu and Dr. Yang Chen.
Yiluan Song visited the National University of Singapore (NUS), her home university, where she received her Bachelor of Science degree in Life Sciences. In the week of Feb 27, 2023, Yiluan gave special seminars entitled "Phenology in the Anthropocene: ecological synchrony, land use, and public health" at the Department of Biological Sciences and the Department of Geography.
Yiluan Song received the EFI Futures Outstanding Presentation Award for her presentation “Ecological forecasting of leafing and flowering phenology during climate change to inform public health” at Ecological Forecasting Initiative 2022 Virtual Conference during May 23 – 25, 2022. She also participated in the Near-term Ecological Forecasting Initiative short course in Boston University June 26 – July 1, 2022.
From NEON blog. Building a Forecasting Community: The EFI-RCN NEON Forecasting Challenge June 9, 2022 ... Phenology Yiluan Song, a grad student at the University of California – Santa Cruz, submitted her forecast in the phenology challenge. Phenology is the science of the timing of recurring biological events, such as leaf-out for plants or migration for birds. The EFI-RCN NEON Forecasting Challenge focused on plant phenology, using color (red and green) data from the NEON [...]
Lab alumnus Chris Zajic was awarded an NSF graduate research fellowship in STEM Education and Learning Research on 4 April 2022. Chris will use the funding provided through the fellowship to investigate the role of social connections in undergraduate life science students’ access to research experiences. This work will be carried out under the guidance of Dr. Erin Dolan at the University of Georgia, where Chris is pursuing a PhD in biochemistry and molecular biology. [...]
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, [...]