Keynote: Defensible Modeling of the Biosphere

To manage the planet on which we all depend, we need to predict the future outcome of various options. How would biofuel subsidies affect crop prices affect deforestation? CO2 emissions affect climate change affect fire? At present, we cannot make such predictions with any confidence. But, as I’ll show in this talk, a computational approach to environmental science can change that. I’ll explain how we built the first fully data-constrained model of the terrestrial carbon cycle, using Big Data, cloud computing, and machine learning. And I’ll demo similar models for global food production, Amazon deforestation, and bird biodiversity. The prototype tools on which these models have been built—for example, FetchClimate, Filzbach, WorldWide Telescope—are freely available, and will hopefully allow other scientists to adopt a rigorous approach to modeling the complexities of the biosphere.

Speaker Details

Drew Purves graduated atop his class in ecology at the University of Cambridge in 1998. He took his Ph.D. at the University of York and spent five years as a post-doc at Princeton University with Professor Steve Pacala, the world’s foremost authority on forest ecology, especially in relation to climate change. Since 2007, Purves has been a scientist in the Computational Ecology and Environmental Science group at Microsoft Research Cambridge and has published two peer-reviewed papers on forest ecology in “Science,” one in ”Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the United States of America,” and two in “Proceedings of the Royal Society, Series B.”. His work focuses on building accurate predictive models of ecosystems to help understand and manage natural resources.

Date:
Speakers:
Drew Purves
Affiliation:
Microsoft Research Cambridge
    • Portrait of Drew Purves

      Drew Purves

      Researcher

    • Portrait of Jeff Running

      Jeff Running