Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge
Ecoinformatics site parent site of Partnership for Biodiversity Informatics site parent site of SEEK - Home
Science Environment for Ecological Knowledge









 

 

 



Beam Knowledge Rep Sept 04

This is version 16. It is not the current version, and thus it cannot be edited.
[Back to current version]   [Restore this version]


Beam Knowledge Representation Meeting, Sept. 21-23, 2004


Participants

    • Mark Schildhauer
    • Deana Pennington
    • Rich Williams
    • Chad Berkley
    • Jianting Zhang
    • Shawn Bowers
    • Kristin Vanderbilt
    • Evan Weiher
    • David Chalcraft
    • Dan Higgins
    • Bertram Ludaescher
    • Katy Suding
    • Steve Cox
    • Bob Waide

September 21st

  • Introductions (8:30-3:45)
    • Mark presentation on SEEK background
    • Deana presentation on Biodiversity, etc.
    • Discussion
      • Species traits
      • Data sets, availability
      • Integration
    • Chad / Dan Presented on Kepler
      • Much interface discussion
      • Showed Pred/Prey and Bio index models
    • Rich Williams on ontologies
      • Restricted to certain axis; spatial patterns (naturally occuring gradients); abundance; temporal
      • In a particular control plot, how are things changing, and are those changes in the same trajectory (in the same gradient change)?
      • Ton of data in range management
      • Q: Are most of these datasets freely available on the web; are people sharing them? A: Few available on web ... Q: But is it possible to get them? A: It is a very divergent / diverse community. Q: W

September 22nd

  • Agenda Setting
    • Some overlapping stuff on every biodiversity analysis
    • Methods / Design focus
    • Analysis focus
    • Mark: Goal is to compartmentalize that provides general utility for next project, for some other analysis; a standard type of function that we want to capture and describe to use for others
    • Bob: At one point there was a database with various scripts that provided the full spectrum of data integration
      • They aren't there anymore (they were on KNB bio)
      • Everthing that was done using scripts, no manual work
      • From 16 or so grasslands
      • Raw data that read in the scripts
      • Project technically still ongoing
      • Aug 2002 first working group
      • Then six months of work after that
      • It would be a good test case / use case to look into
      • Steve: Jornado would be the test case

  • Data Integration
    • Katy
      • Predicting species response to increased rousource availability (history, questions, dataset)
      • what happens when you increase productivity (experimentally), and then look at what happens to diversity
      • N (nitrogen) Fertilization experiments (KBS oldfields, ARC heath)
        • if you add nitrogen, it generally increases productivity (Gough et al. 2000)
        • Every experiment found that as you increase productivy it decreases diversity, which doesn't follow the natural productivity/species-richness curve (this is gaining interest: we are increasing productivity of systems in general with environmental change going on, e.g., urbanization increases nitrogen/fertizilation, and a desire to know the result on diversity)
        • What is Primary Productivity "can of worms"
          • Want to aggregate data at many different scales / communities to get many types of graphs; you want to ultimately go from smallest possible scale to largest scale
          • decision making that goes in, before any analysis happens. This goes into the data discovery/integration. Deana: can we build a repository of methodologies.
          • primarily using herbaceous sites
          • you do a broad category of the dataset, but not the details (a little bit of woody stuff, ...)
          • Bob: need a step where someone can look at the methodology ...
          • Rich: Need to capture what it is you are measuring; it isn't as much a methodology issue
          • Bob: Clark and Clark paper covers some of this (Bob said he'd dig up the ref)
        • most of the time, productivity scales well, i.e., it is a linear scaling, e.g., anpp vs. area is a linear relationship. so for exmaple, even though they are smaller plots, you can get g/m^2 measures. Basically, productivity doubles as area doubles...
        • n addition decresases species diversity: plot at lter sites of anpp (above-ground primary productivity) versus relative species density; species density is the number of species observed in a given area
        • two studies, measures at different scales: either you simulate or measure a species area curve, and extrapolate to different areas.
        • N fertilization positivevly effects productivity negatively effects diversity
          • N fert. interacts with environment; species sorting (dominance composition) negatively effects diversity
        • species response to fertilization:
            • in the case of increased fertility, can we predict what species we will lose? What species will become dominant?
            • are these responses contingent on system characteristics?
        • dataset: 8 lter sites, 28 community types (mainly vegetation classifications, based on the experiments/manipulations done at the sites); 831 species
        • dataset characteristics
          • n added (g/m^2/yr), 10 (ARC), 9.5 (CDR), 60/wk (GCE), etc.
          • Form of N: NH4-NO3 pellets (ARC), Liguid Urea-N, NH4-NO3 pellets, etc.
          • Treatment plot size (m^2): differs from 900 to .25
          • Sample plot size (m^2): .25 to 10 (these don't differ that much really: .32, .30, .25, 1) ... it isn't, however, appropriate to compare directly, without the species area curves, the .3's with the 1's
          • Replication: 2 to 10
          • Duration (yrs): 2 to 13
        • Often times, a matrix like this is constructed at the beginning of doing a "synthesis", and the most important points to track for each site are: treatment, sample size, duration, and replication.



Go to top   More info...   Attach file...
This particular version was published on 22-Sep-2004 11:00:39 PDT by SDSC.bowers.