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…
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…
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…
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.…
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,…
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…
