Workshop: Data-Model Assimilation in Ecology: Techniques and Applications, July 2007

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Ecology is being rapidly transformed from a data-poor to data-rich field. With such rich data sources, it is urgent to develop research capability in the area of data-model assimilation so that large volumes of data can be converted into knowledge of ecosystem functioning. The workshop will be a community effort to comprehend the data-model assimilation approach, learn relevant techniques, examine application cases, discuss general issues in ecological applications, and devise paths to prepare the community for the new era of research. The workshop involve case studies of applications, techniques, and issues in applications, and will recommend future directions in applications of data-model assimilation in ecology. Case studies will present some successful applications in biogeochemistry, population, and community ecology and will illustrate a variety of techniques that have been applied to ecological research, such as genetic algorithms, Markov Chain/Monte Carlo approaches, adjoint methods, and Kalman filters. A session on general application issues will discuss information content of data and models, the best strategies to extract information, ill-conditioned inversion, and selection of target variables. This workshop is designed to help prepare the community for a data-rich, NEON-type era of ecological research. As a research community in ecology, expertise is needed to handle large datasets and gain knowledge from analyzing massive databases. It is urgent to train next generations of ecologists with strong quantitative skills who can apply mathematics and statistics to analyze large volumes of ecological data. The workshop will generate strategies for promotion of data-model assimilation, training of next generation scientists, and publications of methods for data-model assimilation and case studies of applications.The workshop will have 25 participants, including 4 graduate students, 7 junior faculty/scientists, 6 women, and 5 international scientists from Australia, UK, Germany, and Canada. The participants will cover multiple research areas, including limnology, population ecology, community ecology, soil science, ecohydrology, isotope inverse analysis, and biogeochemistry. Results will be published and it is anticipated that the workshop will have major impacts on future research directions in ecology.