ECOLOGICAL FORECASTING
Ecological forecasting
can be defined as the process of predicting
the state of ecosystems, ecosystem services,
and natural capital, with fully specified and
quantified uncertainties, contingent on
explicit scenarios for key
drivers such as climate and land use. The ability
to anticipate environmental change in
regions of rapid development
is one of the greatest challenges to ecological
forecasting. This requires observation
of past activity to understand
interrelationships among drivers and outcomes,
and the development of models that incorporate
our understanding
of these interrelationships.
As a first step in improving our ability
to forecast regional-scale responses to
environmental change in forest
ecosystems, this working group will use modeling
and simulation to understand the diversity
of tree populations
in forests. More specifically, the group will
exploit new computational methods for
both inverse estimation and
forward simulation to evaluate the efficacy of
diversity mechanisms in these ecosystems.
Inverse
estimation makes use of hierarchical
Bayes model structures to
test assumptions of diversity mechanisms.
Forward simulation methods
will be used to test predictions of diversity
mechanisms. Since the underlying models
are spatial and based on data
for individual trees, straightforward simulation
is very slow. Therefore, hierarchical
data structures and approximation
algorithms will be used to simulate the model
efficiently.
The working group brings
together scientists from several
departments in an interdisciplinary effort:
Jim Clark (Biology), Pankaj Agarwal
(Computer Science), Michael Lavine
(Institute of Statistics and Decision Science)
and Dean Urban (Nicholas School of
the Environment and Earth Sciences).
During
Spring 2002 term, the group is offering
a course to graduate students
on ecological data modeling
and application to forecasting. For more
information, please click here.
For more details on the Ecological
Forecasting project, please visit
this web site: http://www.cs.duke.edu/~gsat/ecology.
