Musings, Explorations, and Announcements

General Problem and Approach Shifts between "states" in ecological systems are shifts between dynamical regimes, or between different attractors within a dynamical regime. The warning signals approach attempts to detect characteristics of a system undergoing a transition between dynamical regimes. This transition may have common properties in many systems [#Scheffer2009;], but not all systems [#Hastings2010;]. Another approach would be to characterize the properties of the dynamic regime over a period of time, and attempt to detect if those properties change, irrespective of whether the change takes the particular form.

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Pollen Met with Alan to discuss the conceptual model for regime shift. His suggestion was to look at Sugihara's method of prediction by looking at the difference paths of different systems - useful for when we have lots of data, even if it's sparse for individual sites. Some papers to look at are : http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/76859 - "Distinguishing Error from Chaos in Ecological Time Series" http://www.jstor.org/stable/10.2307/54223 - "Nonlinear Forecasting for the Classification of Natural Time Series"

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Class: Theoretical Ecology First class meeting with Alan - see notes Readings (See notes): Hastings (2008) "Editorial – an ecological theory journal at last" Kareiva (1989) "Renewing the dialogue between theory and experiments in population ecology" Scheiner and Willing (2008) A general theory of ecology Process - Kintr Installed and learned the knitr package. Looks like a great way to write literate code more easily Easy enough to process Multimarkdown, but if processing MMD to Latex/PDF, want to put knitr between the LaTeX and PDF for better processing.

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Letter Submitted public university funding letter to Frontiers in Ecology and Environement. Follow up in a week.January 9, 2012 Warning signals Read Bel et. al. (2012) "Gradual regime shifts in spatially extended ecosystems." and discussed with Carl. Interesting. Shows a simple model of transition between spotted spatial patterning and uniform landscapes, describes the "snaking" bifurcation pattern between the two. Might be applicable to pollen stuff below. Pollen Read Williams et.

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For the seminar I organized on forest pests this quarter, we generated a bibliography of all the papers read or referred to for the various topics.  It can be found here: