Sarah Kiger has completed her PhD dissertation on modeling carbon cycling and ecosystem services in the exurban residential landscape. The abstract from her dissertation follows: “Ecosystem services (ES) are the physical goods and associated benefits that are provided to humans by the ecosystems of the planet. Assessment of ES requires knowledge of ecology and ecosystem…
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…
Gaining a better understanding of carbon (C) dynamics across the terrestrial and aquatic landscape has become a major research initiative in ecosystem ecology. Wetlands store a large portion of the global soil C, but are also highly dynamic ecosystems in terms of hydrology and N cycling, and are one of the most invaded habitats worldwide.…
This work represents an interdisciplinary collaboration among Paige Fischer (project leader), with training in sociology and human geography; Seth Guikema, an engineer with expertise in climate-driven hazards and human decision-making regarding risk; Gretchen Keppel-Aleks, a climate scientist at UM Climate and Space Sciences and Engineering, who focuses on modeling climate impacts on vegetation including forests…
Mondrian is a computer model of wetland community and ecosystem ecology (Currie et al. 2014, Ecological Modelling 282: 69-82). Its main strength is that it spans four levels of organization in a unified, integrated fashion: (1) individual plants and their physiology; (2) population-level processes including fecundity and mortality; (3) community-level processes including competition among native plant…
We recently began a new NASA-funded project, continuing the work with a large collaborative team to link land use, socioeconomic drivers, and climate to the hydrology and water quality in large-river watersheds and the effects on Great Lakes coastal wetlands. In past work, the Michigan team developed the Mondrian model of community-ecosystem processes to better…
