simpple025: Evapotranspiration

In continuation of Ann’s post a couple weeks back, conferences and meetings are very important in becoming a successful and knowledgeable graduate student. Currently, I am in Estes Park, Colorado, which is about 1.5 hours outside Denver and adjacent to Rocky Mountain National Park for the Long-Term Ecological Research All-Scientists Meeting. In a nut-shell, this meeting is held once every three years and brings together scientists and researchers from 26 LTER sites around the country and around the world. This meeting differs from a conference by being primarily focused on cross-site and interdisciplinary collaboration. This is done by holding working group discussion sessions surrounding a particular topic. Scientist that are interested in that topic can participate in a discussion session that has a specific outcome; typically information exchange, brainstorming, or a product such as data analysis or a journal article.

Map of all 26 LTER sites

The working group sessions that are held at a meeting are typically selected by way of a request for proposals. This request is sent to the general scientist community, in this case the LTER community. Researchers will then submit a proposal of the session that they want to hold; including the purpose of the session, the importance, and the potential outcome of the session. This LTER ASM meeting, I had the opportunity to submit a proposal that was accepted by the LTER group that focused on graduate student research in research topics related to hydrology, or how water interacts with the environment. The LTER community has been promoting collaboration between researchers at different sites and between different fields of study. Because of this and my own interests in scientific collaboration, I contacted two graduate students to help co-organize this meeting with me; one from the Everglades/ FCE LTER group and one from the Arctic (ARC) LTER. Additionally, we invited 9 other graduate students from 8 separate LTER sites, spanning tropical to desert conditions, and coastal to inland environments and a wide range of topics from nutient cycling to water flows. You can view some of the presentations from our working group session here.

The reason why we put this session together was to identify relationships between nature and society among the various LTER sites that are inherently linked by water. The 26 LTER sites represent sites that have long-term datasets and allow scientists to look at environment and societal changes over ecological timescales on the orders of years and decades. Long-term data is important, because some of the processes that occur in nature take longer than the few years that a student might be at school doing their research.

In addition to the workshops, we still hold a poster session to highlight the research that we have been working on. I will have my poster up during the meeting to show off my remote sensing research (see earlier blog post). Essenitally I will be presenting how we can use satellite data to measure chloride concentrations and evapotranspiration (evaporation + transpiration). You can read through my abstract here.

These meetings are great opportunities to interact with other graduate students, faculty and researchers that conduct similar research and to learn about what cutting edge research is going on in other parts of the country and world. Additionally, the LTER meetings do a really good job of promoting collaboration and camaraderie between graduate students and faculty by holding social events and field trips. And it’s pretty hard to pass up a field trip to Rocky Mountain National Park. With that, I will leave you with some pictures from the conference.

Cheers,

Graduate Student Mixer- Great opporutnity to meet other great grad students from around the states

Graduate Student Symposium at LTER ASM

View of the Rocky Mountains from the front of our housing

View from our back patio

The Everglades covers an area of 734 square miles, which is about half of the size of the state of Rhode Island and about 350,000 football fields. This is a very large area to cover and can become logistically difficult and costly when you are trying to understand the transformations of the Everglades ecosystem with respect to the natural and man-made modifications to the way water moves through the system. What if there was a way to measure and monitor these changes to the landscape as a whole without even leaving your office? Oh wait, there is! Satellites!

Satellites have been orbiting the Earth (among other celestial bodies) for the past three decades. And since the release of free images from NASA Earth-oriented satellites like Landsat and MODIS, remote sensing science has taken huge strides to understanding Earth surface processes. More specifically, related to my research in the Everglades, I can use the multi-spectral images to measure water quality (nutrient) and chemistry (salt) changes. Additionally, we can use these images to calculate the amount of water that leaves the surface through evapotranspiration; a combination of evaporation (water that changes from a liquid to a gas from open water bodies or the soil) and transpiration (water that is released to the atmosphere from the process of photosynthesis). Measuring the changes to water quality and evapotranspiration in the Everglades will help us understand the man-made and natural impacts to the environment and to hopefully make better environmentally and hydrologically conscious decisions, both managerially and socially. Taking advantage of the longevity of the satellite program, with 30 plus years of satellite data in storage, we can get a great view of how the landscape of the Everglades has changed through time from a combination of human-related and natural effects.

Though the satellite data helps us see the Glades from Space, we still need to collect field-based data from strategic field sites for calibration and validation purpose. However, that is a topic for another day.

And now time for some artsy, scientific images that were made using Landsat images…