Postdoctoral Fellow Model-data synthesis and forecasting across the upper Midwest: Partitioning uncertainty and environmental heterogeneity in ecosystem carbon
A post-doctoral position in ecosystem model-data synthesis and ecological forecasting is available in the Dietze lab in the Department of Earth and Environment at Boston University. This project focuses on integrating eddy-covariance, remote-sensing, forest inventory data, and other ground-based measurements within the Ecosystem Demography 2.2 model to understand and forecast regional-scale ecosystem dynamics across northern Wisconsin. The project is part of the larger PEcAn project (http://pecanproject.org), which aims to make ecosystem models, data assimilation, and forecasting more accessible, automated, and repeatable. As a test bed for the development and application of the PEcAn informatics tools, this project is focused on the temperate/boreal transition zone in northern Wisconsin, a region that is expected to show large climate change responses and is one of the most data-rich regions in the country. The tools developed here will enable us to partition carbon flux and pool variability in space and time and to attribute the regional-scale responses to specific biotic and abiotic drivers. The data-assimilation framework will partition different sources of uncertainty, which will enable a better understanding of which are limiting our inference, and provide a more complete propagation of uncertainty into model forecasts. Qualifications: Minimum qualifications are a doctoral degree in plant ecology or a related ecological or environmental science. Experience with, or interest in learning, Bayesian statistics, ecosystem modeling, remote-sensing, and ecoinformatics tools would be valuable. Salary is commensurate with experience and qualifications. Up to two years and four months of funding is available. Submit a cover letter, CV, and contact info for 3 references to Dr. Michael Dietze (dietze at bu.edu) For more information visit http://pecanproject.org and http://people.bu.edu/dietze
