NWFSC Monster Seminar Jam: Lizzie Wolkovich, PhD
This seminar is part of the Northwest Fisheries Science Center's Monster Seminar Jam series.
About
Lizzie Wolkovich, PhD (University of British Columbia) is presenting a talk, "How a 90 minute fake data simulation solved a puzzle my lab had spent 3,000+ hours on." The talk will be moderated by Eli Holmes (Northwest Fisheries Science Center).
Abstract
Over the last five years, a growing number of studies have documented dampened shifts in tree leafout with continued warming. These findings supported experimental studies that showed shifting cues for plants as
temperatures rise, and suggested climate change has already reshaped fundamental biological processes. Over the same time, my lab launched a major meta-analysis of all published growth chamber studies of tree
leafout---scraping 16,000 rows of data spanning 60 years of research, spending at least 3,000 person hours on data cleaning, scrubbing, and analysis using Bayesian hierarchical models---to try to understand these shifts. Here I'll review how we tackled the meta-analyses, what we learned from it about fundamental plant responses to temperature and daylength in experiments and in natural conditions across Europe.
After all our work, we found ourselves no closer to understanding dampening effects of spring temperatures with warming. But a 90 minute data simulation I did on a train to Seattle one morning suggests a simple answer to this puzzle, that could affect many studies of temperature responses with climate change.
Biography
Elizabeth Wolkovich is an Associate Professor at the University of British Columbia (UBC) where she runs the Temporal Ecology Lab. She received her PhD from Dartmouth, completed postdoctoral work at UC-Santa Barbara, UC-San Diego, UBC and is a Visiting Scholar in Organismic & Evolutionary Biology at Harvard University. Her research program examines how climate change shapes plants and plant communities, with a focus on shifts in the timing of seasonal development (e.g., budburst, flowering and fruit maturity)---known as phenology. Currently she is studying how temperature and photoperiod drive phenology across North American woody species and how climate change impacts different winegrape varieties’ phenologies.
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