- Detroit Sustainability ClinicSEAS hosts a Sustainability Clinic in Detroit, described in several news articles from 2021 including this press release on the SEAS website, written by Denise Spranger. From that press release: “Its goal: improve the ability of the City of Detroit and nonprofits serving the City to address the impacts of climate change on the natural and…
- Several SEAS researchers represented in MIDAS PODS grantsMIDAS, the Michigan Institute for Data Science, is a University of Michigan (U-M)-wide institute with 420 affiliated faculty from 60 departments. Each year MIDAS awards a series of pilot-study grants for research in data science and artificial intelligence, known as PODS grants (Propelling Original Data Science). This year, four researchers in SEAS received three of…
- SEAS Deans Junior Faculty Mentoring ProgramBill Currie created the SEAS Deans Junior Faculty Mentoring Program in 2019 and continues to lead the program. This is a brief description of some aspects of the program, in part so that folks in other departments and universities can benefit from what we’ve learned. First, each pre-tenure, tenure-track faculty member is assigned a multi-mentor…
- Greenhouse gas emissions from Great Lakes wetlandsYe 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 Minority University Research and Education Project (MUREP)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…
- Modeling carbon cycling and ecosystem services in the exurban residential landscape: Sarah Kiger PhD dissertationSarah 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…
- Case-based course “Sustainability Issues in the Great Lakes Region”Bill Currie teaches the course “Sustainability Issues in the Great Lakes Region” (Environ 305) as part of the undergraduate Program in the Environment at the University of Michigan. This course was one of ten finalists for the Provost’s Teaching Innovation Prize in 2020. This course uses a case-study approach. Students learn to examine complexities, tradeoffs,…
- Bill Currie elected as a AAAS FellowBill Currie was elected in 2019 as an AAAS Fellow. AAAS Fellows are elected by their peers for their “scientifically or socially distinguished efforts to advance science or its applications.” Currie was elected for “advancing society’s understanding of ecosystem function through advanced modeling, particularly nutrient cycling and carbon balance in forests and wetlands and their…
- NASA-funded Workshop on “Planning for the Future of Great Lakes Coastal Ecosystems”Bill Currie, together with collaborators Dr. Laura Bourgeau-Chavez and Charlotte Weinstein at Michigan Tech Research Institute and Dr. Sherry Martin at Michigan State University, co-organized this NASA-funded workshop. Held in Ann Arbor, the workshop drew 25 participants from Minnesota to New York, including those from The Michigan Department of Natural Resources, the Nature Conservancy, and…
- Reducing wetland nutrient inflows has limited effect on reducing Phragmites invasionsJason 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…
- Arctic trends of rising land surface temperatures and marine productivity: Liza Jenkins PhD workLiza 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…
- New SEAS Dean’s junior faculty mentoring programBill 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…
- Wetland modeling presentations at the Ecological Society of America conference 2019This 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.…
- Abby Meyer presentation at Michigan Sea Grant symposiumUniversity 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…
- Faculty candidates: Tips for a successful “skype” interviewA 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…
- Getting involved in research: What to discuss with a potential advisor-mentorProspective 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)…
- Human Appropriation of NPP in the Upper Midwest regionNet 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…
- New class fall 2018: Sustainability Issues in the Great Lakes RegionBill 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,…
- Great Lakes Commission WebinarOur 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…
- An interactive, online quick-reference model for adaptive management and restoration of coastal wetlandsWith 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…
- Stephen Hawking on model-dependent realismWith 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…
- Seminar at Texas A&M: Sustainability Science and the Great Lakes Social-Ecological GradientIn 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…
- Panel discussion on wetland management: Stewardship Network ConferenceLaura 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…
- Modeling: Wetland carbon storage arising from hydroperiod, N inflow, and plant communityGaining 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.…
- Could climate models include human adaptation in vegetation management?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…
- Paper: Balancing water quality and economic returns in a Lake Erie watershedWe recently had a paper accepted in Ecological Economics, led by Hui Xu, a recent PhD student advised by Dan Brown in SEAS. The research assessed the trade-offs in the abatement of phosphorous runoff into Lake Erie that could be gained with different land uses that have less P runoff than fertilized cropland, versus the…
- Erin Barton internship with The Nature ConservancyErin Barton spent summer 2017 on an internship working with The Nature Conservancy, Colorado Chapter, on their Sustainable Grazing Lands Program. She was awarded this internship as part of the Wyss Scholarship, funded by the Wyss Foundation, which provides funding for students focosed on conservation issues in the American West. Describing her intership, Erin wrote,…
- Major updates to the Mondrian modelMondrian 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…
- New seminar course on coastal wetlandsBill Currie will be offering a new, 1-credit graduate seminar course on coastal wetlands for fall 2017. Class will meet every two weeks for 2 hours, 4-6 p.m., starting on Monday September 11. The focus will be mainly on Great Lakes coastal wetlands, their ecology and management, but to some extent we’ll look at coastal…
- NASA grant: Futures of Great Lakes watersheds and coastal ecosystemsWe 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…
- International Association of Great Lakes Researchers (IAGLR): Detroit 2017Bill Currie and students attended the IAGLR (International Association of Great Lakes Researchers) in Detroit in May, 2017. Bill presented in a special session on the management of invasive Phragmites in Great Lakes wetlands, a session that combined talks by management professionals and university researchers from across the region. Bill gave a presentation about using…
- Master’s Project: Center for Alaskan Coastal StudiesCongratulations to Master’s students Christina Carlson, Josh Flickinger, Sarah (Quill) Turner, Alex Clayton, and Yifan (Flora) He, who completed their SEAS Master’s Project “Inspiration Ridge Preserve Baseline Ecological Inventory and Management Plan.” Bill Currie was the faculty advisor and the client for this project was the Center for Alaskan Coastal Studies (CACS). CACS is obtaining…
- Master’s Project: Values and Threats to the NorthwoodsCongratulations to Master’s students Kate Keeley, Elliott Kurtz, Luxian Li, Ed Waisanen, Yu Xin, and Fan Zhang, who completed their SEAS Master’s Project “Supporting conservation and decision-making in the Northwoods: Mapping forest values, services, and threats.” The client for this project was The Nature Conservancy of Michigan, with Doug Pearsall as the client contact. Working…
- Paper: Perennial bioenergy crops can improve landscape-scale wild bee habitatJohn 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…