I am seeking instructors to participate in a distributed graduate course in fall, 2013. The goals of this NSF project are to (i) train graduate students to collaborate more effectively with agency land managers and (ii) provide land managers with relevant scientific information about the ecological impacts of climate change in sagebrush steppe ecosystems.
During fall, 2013, participating instructors will partner with land managers to teach a 1-2 credit course introducing students to climate change vulnerability assessment and then leading the students through an original analysis of their own design. The course will be followed by a series of working group meetings during which a subset of students from each participating university will collaborate on a written report to be distributed to land management agencies in the Intermountain West. I hope to attract participants to address climate trends and projections, C cycling and forage production, hydrological cycling, biodiversity (everything from habitat shifts to endangered species), biological invasions, and disturbance regimes. I also hope to attract participants representing a range of research approaches, including species distribution modeling, population modeling, long-term studies, literature review, paleoecology, landscape ecology, and dynamic global vegetation modeling. For more information, please email peter.adler [at] usu.edu.
