**Please distribute to potentially interested parties** USGS Mendenhall Post-doctoral Research Program - FY14 Research Opportunity (RO)
RO 14-9. From Local to Landscape: Harmonics and Synthesis of Phenology and Climate Data Across Spatial and Temporal Scales This 2-year post-doctoral fellowship in the USGS-Mendenhall program is currently available with an application deadline of September 20, 2013, and with a start date in 2014. The successful candidate will craft a research project to explicitly use one or more methods to characterize the shape of complex curves in environmental time series to identify resonance and relationships among landscape and local phenology and other environmental drivers such as climate variability. The need to understand to understand local patterns of recurring seasonal biological events (phenology) in the context of environmental variation at regional to continental scales has emerged as a priority for natural resource management, especially in response to global climate change. Although landscape-level remotely-sensed land surface phenology (LSP)—in the form of time-series vegetation indices and derivatives known as phenometrics—is a powerful tool to understand the response of a landscape to the sum of its environmental conditions, the linkages between LSP, ground-based observations of phenology, and environmental forcings, such as climate, remain poorly understood. Spatially extensive, ground-based, standardized datasets being collected and organized by the USA National Phenology Network (USA-NPN; www.usanpn.org), for example, represent a rapidly emerging resource for the development of techniques to cross-walk and identify linkages between LSP captured by satellites and phenological activity observed on the ground. The continent-wide coverage and frequent repeat times of LSP (e.g., from MODIS), the national network of historic meteorological data, and the more recent ground-based phenophase observations have the potential to be integrated together to understand both pattern and process that can be translated broadly across the landscape. The successful candidate will identify a suite of datasets with appropriate spatial and temporal scales, including in situ phenophase data, LSP data and/or associated phenometrics, and climate data. The optimal proposal would also identify a potential application that is relevant to science-informed decision-making. For more information, see http://geology.usgs.gov/postdoc/opps/2014/14-9 Wallace.htm or contact research advisors Cynthia Wallace, cwall...@usgs.gov; Jake F. Weltzin, jwelt...@usgs.gov; Joel B. Sankey, jsan...@usgs.gov; or Jesslyn F. Brown, jfbr...@usgs.gov. Going to the Annual Meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Minneapolis...? Jake will be available for short in-person meetings on T-Th to discuss this opportunity. Alternatively, stop by the USA-NPN Booth #214 for more information. See also www.usanpn.org/esa2013 for more info about USA-NPN activities at the ESA meeting. -- Jake F. Weltzin Ecologist, US Geological Survey Executive Director, USA National Phenology Network USA-NPN National Coordinating Office 1955 East 6th Street Tucson, AZ 85721 Phone: (520) 626-3821 Fax: (520) 621-7834 E-mail: jwelt...@usgs.gov NPN homepage: http://www.usanpn.org/
