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…
In late February I visited my friend and colleague Jason Martina at Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas. For several years, Jason and I have been collaborating on augmenting and applying the Mondrian model of wetland community-ecosystem processes. For research funded under a current NASA grant, We are working together to add denitrification and…
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…
John Graham, who completed his PhD degree at Michigan in 2016, was lead author on a new paper just published in Landscape Ecology. In this work, John used landscape ecology methods to assess whether perennial bioenergy crops like switchgrass or prairie grasses, if used in a large agricultural watershed in Illinois, could improve landscape-scale habitat…
