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Understanding the earth’s life support systems, and predicting and
mitigating the rapid changes that are occurring in these systems because
of human activities is one of the great global scientific challenges
humanity is currently facing. The programme in ecological and
environmental sciences aims to contribute to meeting this challenge by
working with the scientific community to identify critical problems and
develop novel computational methods and tools for addressing these
problems. Problems range from the management and integration of the
ever-expanding body of ecological and environmental data to developing
novel data analysis and visualization methods to developing advanced
predictive models of biotic and coupled biotic and physical systems at
scales from local to global.
Team
We are a young and growing group with an extended family of
collaborators in Europe and elsewhere.
Projects
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Autonomous Monitoring of Vulnerable Habitats
Automatic monitoring of the effects of changing environmental conditions
on the ecology and behaviour of the Manx Shearwater. (Robin Freeman)
- Cambridge University Herbarium Digitisation
Digitization and online publication of the most scientifically and
historically significant parts of the Cambridge University Herbarium’s
collection. (Rich Williams)
- Computational Tools for Biodiversity Science
A multi-institution consortium addressing the scientific and
technological needs of biodiversity scientists and policy makers. (Rich
Williams & Elizaveta Pachepsky)
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Data-constrained Simulation
Modelling of Plant Growth
Plant communities may act to amplify or dampen changes in the Earth’s
climate system caused by anthropogenic CO2 pollution, but current
understanding of these potential effects is limited by a lack of
quantitative knowledge of individual plant growth. This project will
build a tool for defining, parameterizing, and running simulations of
non-linear biological models, and use this tool to generate plant growth
models whose predictions can be trusted enough to integrate into larger
analyses. (Drew Purves)
- Environmental Scenario Search Engine
Developing tools to do fuzzy logic queries on terabyte datasets. (Rich
Williams)
- Structure and Dynamics of Complex
Ecological Networks
Computational approaches to studying food webs, networks of who eats
whom in an ecosystem. (Rich Williams)
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Toolbox for Spatial Analysis of
Invasive Species Spread
Invasive species are causing significant economic and environmental
damages worldwide. This project will develop a tool to calculate the
rate of spatial spread of an invasive species though habitat, and to
determine the factors that determine that rate. (Elizaveta Pachepsky)
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Tools for the Analysis, Interpretation, and Visualization of Primary
Biodiversity Data from Mexican Cloud Forests
Evaluating and applying emerging ecological niche modelling techniques
to study the changing distribution of Mexican cloud forests. (Rich
Williams)
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Using 25 Years of Infra-red Satellite Data to
Derive a New Global Fire Model
Forests harbour around 60% of the world’s biodiversity and around half
of its terrestrial carbon, so there is an urgent need to predict how
forests will respond to increased atmospheric CO2, logging and land-use
change. This project will collate millions of pre-existing field
measurements of trees from national forest inventories into a coherent,
user-friendly database and use this data in the development and
parameterization of models fire at global scales. (Drew Purves)
Some Projects in Development Ecological Data Management.
Working closely with academic partners to identify common themes and
problems in the management of such data, we aim to create the tools that
allow ecologists to collate, manage and disseminate their data in an
efficient, powerful but easy to use way. (Robin Freeman)
Spatial Modelling and Optimization Tools for
Conservation Science.
This project will develop a spatial modelling and optimization tools
for optimal marine reserve design and other optimization problems in
ecology and biology. (Elizaveta Pachepsky)
Analysing Animal Movement.
High resolution data from animal movement can now be collected
allowing researchers to identify changes in the animals’ behaviour.
Here, we hope to create tools and techniques that allow researchers to
apply these tools to arbitrary positional information. (Robin Freeman)
Building a Global Database of Forest Inventory Data.
Forests harbour around 60% of the world’s biodiversity and around
half of its terrestrial carbon, so there is an urgent need to predict
how forests will respond to continuing anthropogenic perturbations
including increased atmospheric CO2, logging and land-use change. To aid
in the development and parameterization of models to predict these
responses, this collaboration will collate millions of pre-existing
field measurements of trees from national forest inventories, into a
coherent, user-friendly database. (Drew Purves)
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