Jason Martina, a collaborator at Texas State University, gave two conference presentations in Texas this month, reporting on new results from our research collaboration to study the relationship between elevated nutrient loading to wetlands and invasion by Phragmites australis. Results were based on thousands of simulation runs conducted with the Mondrian wetland community-ecosystem model. These…
Liza Jenkins completed her PhD degree from SEAS in May 2019. Dr. Jenkins works at the Michigan Tech Research Institute in Ann Arbor, where she is continuing her research applying satellite remote sensing to study global change in the Arctic. Liza recently led a paper published in Ambio with results from some of her dissertation…
Bill Currie is helping to design a new SEAS Dean’s Junior Faculty Mentoring Program and will lead the implementation of the new program in its first year. The program will have a few complementary elements: In a regular monthly meeting for new faculty, a series of topics will be covered that combine mentoring with new…
This year at the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Louisville, Kentucky, we gave four presentations on Great Lakes coastal wetlands. All four presentations reported model runs that made use of the Mondrian community-ecosystem model. The poster presentation given by graduate student Ye Yuan was her first presentation at a national conference.…
University of Michigan undergraduate Abby Meyer worked with us over the summer of 2019, with a fellowship from Michigan Sea Grant. Using the Mondrian wetland community-ecosystem model, Abby studied the spatial patterns of plant population growth produced by different branching frequencies among native and invasive wetland plants. Abby also wrote code to display the branching…
A teleconference interview with an academic search committee has become a standard practice in university searches for faculty hiring. (Here I’ll call it a “skype” interview, although a variety of teleconferencing software is used.) For example, as part of an expansion in SEAS we recently did four national searches that all included skype interviews. The…
Prospective and new graduate students often contact a professor and say they would like to get involved in research. This post covers some basic advice that is meant to help you have a productive dialogue with professors about that, whether you are already in graduate school in a specific program (including the students I advise)…
Net Primary Productivity (NPP) quantifies the amount of plant biomass produced each year, per unit area, in an ecosystem or a landscape. NPP is a central concept in ecology, conservation, and sustainability science. It is used to quantify the amount of crop produced on a cropland, forage on a rangeland, timber produced in a managed…
Bill Currie is developing a new undergraduate course for fall 2018, titled “Sustainability Issues in the Great Lakes Region.” This new course, listed as Environ 305, is offered as part of the recently re-organized Program in the Environment, a joint undergraduate major between the School for Environment and Sustainability and the College of Literature, Science,…
