Rapp et al. paper in Ecology: “Populations within species are generally assumed to be less productive at colder temperatures, but this study demonstrates that this assumption may not hold in tropical forests.” [more]
Kai Zhu receives the Ecological Society of America (ESA) 2012 Outstanding Research in Ecology by a Graduate Student Award on August 7 at the ESA annual meeting in Portland, OR. [more]
Kai Zhu has been named winner of this year’s Dean’s Award for Outstanding PhD Student Manuscript of Duke University’s Nicholas School of the Environment. He was honored for his entry, “Failure to migrate: lack of tree range expansion in response to climate change,” which was published in Global Change Biology. He will be acknowledged at this year’s graduation ceremony on May 12, and receive a check for $1,500. [more]
“The National Science Foundation has awarded a grant totaling $4,273,484 to fund the study, which aims to provide the first probabilistic forecasts of combined forest biodiversity responses to climate change, including growth, reproduction and mortality risk, directly linked to the process scale…” [more]
“Researchers at Duke developed a novel statistical model that is able to devise new ways of identifying people who are infected with malaria but don’t show symptoms of infection…” [more]
“Zhu, Woodall and Clark use a relatively simple and elegant approach to analyze forest inventory analysis (FIA) data… [T]he work is a valuable contribution and gives sufficient evidence that range responses of trees to climate change will not be as simple as a little bump to the north…” links to F1000 evaluation and GCB article.
Duke’s competitive Katherine Goodman Stern Fellowship has been awarded to Denis Valle for the 2012-13 academic year, selected from nominations university-wide.
GCB paper on failure to migrate
Articles/Reports:
Multimedia:
Press Release:
from Fernando Colchero’s PhD
“With this Bayesian method, one is able to make inferences about individuals using population-level data.” links to f1000 and the paper in J Animal Ecol.
“Pollen and seed dispersal inferred from seedling genotypes: the Bayesian revolution has passed here too…” The Perspectives section of Molecular Ecology
the new paper in Global Change Biology on the epidemiology of trees has press release from NSF. Read the release here.
from 18 years of forest response in Ecological Monographs: High-dimensional coexistence based on individual variation: a synthesis of evidence. Link to the full abstract is here. This paper was recently selected by the Faculty of 1000. Read the evaluation here.
Carl Salk has won the 2010 Peccei Award from the International Institute for Applied Systems Analysis.
Salk completed his PhD in 2011.
New warming experiment at Duke and Harvard in Duke Environment Magazine
“Cressie et al. describe how ecological uncertainty is routinely and systematically underrepresented, but also how it can be represented more comprehensively…” [more]
“Using a Bayesian state space framework and Monte Carlo simulations, the authors show the importance of density dependence and an increase in mean drought severity (surrogate for climate change) in driving population survival…” [more]
Duke magazine coverage of climate research