Philippe Ciais, Josep Peñuelas, Sara Vicca and Daniel Goll in collaboration with Chinese colleagues, organised a workshop entitled: Nutrient limitation on land: how accurate are our global land models?
The workshop was hosted by the Northwest Agricultural and Forestry University from the 15th to 17th June 2016 in the Yangling, Shaanxi, China.
You can access the program here.
Aim of the Workshop:
Phosphorus (P) has been shown to limit a number of fundamental processes in a wide range of ecosystems; however, despite its importance, most earth system models do not currently include any manner of the P cycle. This hinders the utility of these models for generating and testing hypotheses and for forecasting the effects of global change. Importantly, a critical challenge for P modeling efforts is also a critical challenge for the scientific community as a whole; namely, determining a way forward for improving our understanding of the key drivers, processes, and global change responses of the P cycle. Bringing together P experts would allow for the addressing of this need through: (1) a more synthetic understanding and conceptualization of P cycle dynamics, (2) the merging of varied P and associated data, (3) improved process-based modeling of the P cycle, and (4) P data-model integration. Another potential success stems from the power of explicit collaborations between empiricists who study P cycling and modelers considering the inclusion of P into models.
Imbalance-P participation:
During the forth session of the workshop, entitled: “Understanding P processes in the context of global change”, Prof. Josep Peñuelas, Prof. Ivan Janssens and Dr. Daniel Goll presented the some of the results of the ERC Imbalance-P project in the field of experimentation, data analysis and modelling.
The program of the workshop can be accessed here.
Bayesian modeling workshop with Dr. Kiona Ogle
Paris, 30 & 31 January, 2017
Summary: This workshop will provide a brief introduction to Bayesian and hierarchical Bayesian modeling. It includes presentation and discussion of basic concepts, including important elements of Bayesian statistics and hierarchical Bayesian modeling. Participants will have the opportunity to develop and implement a Bayesian model in OpenBUGS (in R).
Description: Ecologists are often faced with analyzing relatively complicated data. For example, ecological data sets can be spatially, temporally, or hierarchically structured; they may be missing relevant information; and they likely arise from nonlinear and/or non-Gaussian processes. Additionally, many contemporary problems in ecology require the synthesis of multiple sources and types of data. To accommodate this complexity, Bayesian and hierarchical Bayesian statistical methods are emerging as powerful tools for analyzing such data. This two-daylong workshop will provide an overview of Bayesian modeling at a relatively introductory level. This includes presentation and discussion of basic concepts, including important elements of Bayesian statistics and hierarchical Bayesian modeling. We will also provide an OpenBUGS (Bayesian software package) demonstration. During the workshop, participants will have the opportunity to develop and implement a Bayesian model based on a selection of ecological problems and data. By the end of the workshop, participants will be able to understand the fundamentals of Bayesian modeling and develop basic hierarchical models. We will provide reference materials so participants can explore the topics in greater depth. These materials should serve as a jumping-off point for those interested in employing the methods in their own research, or for those who simply want to familiarize themselves with the topic.
Dr. Kiona Ogle
