That’s an abridged title of my new project, which is an NSF Macrosystems (Heffernan et al. 2014) grant. I saw the job posting for this project on Ornithology Exchange, which is how it caught my eye. There is a project goal similar to what I have done for my dissertation, and I look forward to working on that portion as the data becomes available. Especially how my 3rd chapter panned out, this project really became ideal as a next step. I look forward to incorporating the connectivity aspect, and related, the wetland modeling. My new supervisors are experts in Prairie Complex Hydrological Model (PCHM-S) and WETLANDSCAPE, so I’ll be happy to dig into the details there as I think about landscape ecology questions. Network theory will be a cool new area to add to my experience. As the featured map shows, in addition to the Prairie Potholes, we’ll be looking at the Playa Lakes, which is a new system to me. I’ll be learning about graph-theoretic approaches along the way.
I’m also excited, by the nature of this grant, to collaborate with several different teams at a few universities. My dissertation incorporated climate and weather, and it will be neat to work with different data sets and a group of climate experts.
Heffernan, James B., et al. “Macrosystems ecology: understanding ecological patterns and processes at continental scales.” Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment 12.1 (2014): 5-14.