News

News from the Environmental Data Science Innovation & Inclusion Lab (ESIIL): After careful consideration, we are excited to announce ESIIL’s first cohort of working groups! These groups will play a pivotal role in promoting the integrative approach to environmental data science championed by ESIIL, pooling knowledge and expertise from various disciplines to tackle environmental issues with a data-driven perspective.  Linking Phenological Change to Range Change in North American Plant Species Short Title: Macrophenology PI: Sydne Record (University [...]

Climate change threatens global forest carbon sequestration, study finds   Published On: January 15, 2024 Written By: Lauren Barnett, University of Florida Contact: Jim Erickson Social Media: Share on: Share on Twitter Share on Facebook Share on LinkedIn Study: Climate change determines the sign of productivity trends in US forests (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.2311132121) Climate change is reshaping forests differently across the United States, according to a new analysis of U.S. Forest Service data. With rising temperatures, escalating droughts, wildfires and disease [...]

Kai Zhu visited Yale University, co-hosted by the Hixon Center for Urban Sustainability and the Forest School at the Yale School of the Environment. On Nov 9, 2023, Kai gave a seminar talk titled "Plant biodiversity responses to climate change: Contrasting implications from forests and grasslands."

Lab members and friends enjoyed the 117th Annual SEAS Campfire on Sep 22 in Saginaw Forest. Yi and Jiali won a cool "prize" in the traditional log sawing competition, and Tim wore waders, winning the championship!

Michigan Institute for Data Science (MIDAS) announces 2023 Propelling Original Data Science (PODS) Grant awardees Kai Zhu (School for Environment and Sustainability) and Kerby Shedden (Statistics) Bayesian modeling of multi-source phenology to forecast airborne allergen concentration We aim to improve the short-term and long-term predictions of airborne allergens under climate change, an emerging public health concern. To achieve this, we propose to develop novel data science tools to effectively assimilate multiple data sources and integrate various data-driven and [...]

From June 18 to 23, members of the Zhu Lab, together with Dr. Inés Ibáñez, embarked on a research trip to the University of Minnesota to explore various field experiments there. We first visited the Cedar Creek Long Term Ecological Research at Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve. Dr. Peter Reich introduced the BioCON (Biodiversity, CO2, and Nitrogen) experiment, the "Big" Biodiversity Experiment, the BAC (biodiversity and climate) experiment, a forest biodiversity experiment as part of [...]

On May 18, members of the Zhu Lab and Dr. Yang Chen's group in the Department of Statistics gathered to celebrate Yiluan completing her PhD program exit talk as well as the new collaboration between the two research groups.

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.