Bannister 110

This is a free public lecture that begins at 5:30 pm.

Tree-ring based reconstructions of streamflow variability are useful to water resource management. A challenge when developing reconstructions is assessing multiple uncertainties and how these uncertainties impact use in resource management. The skill of tree-ring reconstructions greatly depends on the quality and availability of tree-ring data and the instrument records used for reconstruction training and testing. This presentation will touch on the impact of potential uncertainty in instrumental records with an emphasis on streamflow reconstructions in the Upper Klamath River basin.

Our aim is to fill important gaps both in the scientific basis for the use of tree rings as natural archives of past climate and in the scientific understanding of the rates and patterns of carbon storage in annual growth layers in relation to seasonal to inter-annual climate variation. These gaps concern the basic natural history of the tissue that forms annual rings in wood, the vascular cambium.

Part of the paralysis of our climate politics is the difficulty in making climate change science tangible and personable. Biodiversity and forests in particular provide numerous services for society, human health, and the economy. Given current and projected climate change, how are our western forests changing and what will our western forests come to look like? Using new collaborative Big Data approaches to integrate, standardize, utilize, and visualize the world's biodiversity and forest data, I will present a new platform to visualize biodiversity and forest data.