Biodiversity Confronts Climate Change in the Big-Data Era: Promise and Pitfalls for Understanding and Anticipating Change
Jim Clark, Nicholas Distinguished Professor of Environmental Science
This event was held March 5, 2021.
The emergence of large monitoring networks and expanding quantitative methods can improve our understanding of how biodiversity is changing and why. Environmental scientists are getting better at describing the direct effects of climate change on individual organisms and populations. How to put these direct effects together into models for community change remains a serious challenge. Using forest regeneration as an example, Dr. Jim Clark will discuss how data and models can exploit millions of observations, hundreds of thousands of individuals, and hundreds of species, to understand the indirect effects that control biodiversity change. In fact, indirect effects emerge as key variables governing biogeographic variation in forest change.
About the Series
Dean Steelman is excited to announce the inaugural year of the Dean’s Lecture Series. These quarterly lectures are intended to highlight the exciting research at the Nicholas School, and engage interdisciplinary researchers in a discussion around innovative science. Invited lecturers may choose to present a big picture of their research program, or do a Research in Progress lecture – the goal is to share our innovation with our research community.