Musings, Explorations, and Announcements

I’m excited to share that we’ve started a new R users’ group at UC Davis! Right now our main purpose is to run weekly 2-hour work/hack sessions where R users can get together to work through problems together. More info here

As I begin to put together material for my thesis proposal, I’m collecting literature on regime shifts in forest ecosystems. I’m interested in the time scale of regime shifts, and how they compare with the time scale of stand dynamics (typically decades), which are the dominant time scale in forestry economics. Here is a preliminary set of examples and citations. I’ve also created a Mendeley group with the papers I’m collecting for this topic.

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I’m pretty pleased that my IGERT team’s work has garnered both Judge’s Choice and Community Choice awards in the IGERT video and poster competition. IGERT (Integrative Graduate Education and Research Traineeship) is a National Science Foundation program to foster interdisciplinary research at the graduate level. Here at UC Davis, our team includes ecologists and a historian, and we have been looking at how floodplain restoration can be shaped by both bioeconomic constraints and historical legacies.

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Carl Walters of UBC came to UC Davis for our seminar in adaptive management. Carl was also kind enough to permit us to post the pre-print of the paper which he was presenting, which you can download here. These are my rough notes from the talk. Any errors or misrepresentations are my own. Central tenet of adaptive management is that policies should be treated as experimental treatments with uncertain outcomes.

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Jo Albers of OSU visited UC Davis’ Agricultural and Resource Economics department to speak about her work on optimal management on invasive species management. The work is also part of Kim Hall’s dissertation research and was completed in conjunction Majid Taleghan, Tom Dietterich, and Mark Crowley from OSU Engineering. These are my rough notes from Dr. Albers’ talk talk. Any errors or misrepresentations are my own. Economics of invasive species Need to bring the biology back into bioeconomic modeling.

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