Ye Yuan recently completed her Master’s thesis research titled “Global warming potential driven by nitrogen inflow and hydroperiod in a model of Great Lakes coastal wetlands.” Ms. Yuan worked together with Bill Currie and the rest of the Mondrian model development team to add wetland GHG emissions to the model, including nitrous oxide (N2O), methane…
NASA’s Minority University Research and Education Project (MUREP) Ocean Biology and Biogeochemistry (OCEAN) has awarded $750,000 to a multi-institution project to study the vulnerability of the Lake Huron ecosystem to global change. Dr. Bill Currie, a professor at the U-M School for Environment and Sustainability, is co-principal investigator of the research project, along with Jason…
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…
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…
Our research team gave a webinar in the Great Lakes Commission series this week (dated July 25, 2018). The Great Lakes Commission hosts a webinar series on the management of invasive Phragmites in Great Lakes wetlands. Title: A primer on the user-friendly Mondrian model for wetland ecology and invasive species management Presented by: Dr. Bill Currie…
With the spread of invasive Phragmites in the Great Lakes basin, scientists and managers in the region are working together to understand the factors that contribute to the spread of this noxious reed and to identify the best strategies to control it. Phragmites has become established over large areas of shoreline, river banks, embayments, and…
With Stephen Hawking’s recent passing, it made me think about the influence that he has had not only as a physicist but also as a writer for the general scientific audience. In particular, there is a wonderful discussion of models and their role in the epistemology of science in his book The Grand Design (2010, with…
Laura Bourgeau-Chavez (Michigan Tech Research Institute), Phyllis Higman (Michigan Natural Features Inventory), and Bill Currie gave a presentation and panel discussion at “The Science, Practice & Art of Restoring Native Ecosystems 2018” conference organized by The Stewardship Network in East Lansing, MI, January 12-13, 2018. We gave a tag-team presentation titled “Sharing insights on invasive…
