14. Improving vegetation model simulations of future climate change impacts for the management of public lands in the United States

Understanding how ecological systems will respond to future changes in climate and climate variability is currently an important research focus aimed at answering questions such as 1) How might climate change affect the distributions of species? 2) Will climate change alter the frequency and magnitude of important ecosystem disturbances such as wildfires and droughts? and, 3) What are the implications of these changes for natural resource management? Of the many different types of vegetation models, dynamic global vegetation models (DGVMs) hold great promise for exploring these and other research questions. DGVMs have been used to investigate the temporal and spatial dynamics of ecosystem responses to climate change, test hypotheses about ecosystem response, and forecast potential future ecosystem impacts.

The goal of this postdoctoral research opportunity is to modify and apply a DGVM to investigate ecosystem responses to future climate change, with a focus on those ecosystem processes that are of particular concern for conservation and natural resource managers. We invite research proposals that use DGVMs [LPJ (Lund-Potsdam-Jena; Sitch et al., 2003, Global Change Biology 9:161-185) is the DGVM currently used in our research] to investigate one of the following areas:
Species and habitat distribution : Refining and adding new model definitions of species and plant functional types to assess the sensitivity of the distributions of important species and habitat types to future climate change.
Hydrologic cycle : Improving parameterizations and submodels of soil hydrology, snow accumulation, or permafrost dynamics relative to observed data in order to increase our understanding and confidence in model simulations for future time periods.
Disturbance regime : Simulating potential changes in the magnitude and frequency of wildfire, drought, or insect outbreak events under future climate conditions.

The ability of DGVMs to function at relatively fine spatial and temporal resolutions is important for improving their relevance to conservation and natural resource management activities. The proposed research should be scalable, thereby improving the ability of the DGVMs to simulate ecosystem processes at fine spatial (e.g., ~1 km) and temporal (e.g., daily) resolutions as well as at coarser scales.

Research proposals should describe in detail how the work will lead to improvements in 1) DGVM simulations of the physical processes that control ecosystem responses to climate change and 2) the usefulness of DGVM simulations for conservation and natural resource management activities. The postdoctoral researcher will work closely with USGS scientists and their colleagues and with conservation and natural resource scientists and managers to incorporate the information needs of managers into their research design. Full access to state-of-the-art global and regional climate model simulations for past, present and future climates will be available as will the opportunity to work closely with a climate modeling project. This position requires 1) demonstrated experience working with vegetation models, 2) computer programming skills (e.g., FORTRAN90, C++) necessary to revise, expand and run model codes, and 3) the ability to evaluate model simulations quantitatively and graphically. Previous experience working on conservation and natural resource issues is also desirable.

Proposed Duty Station: Corvallis, OR

Areas of Ph.D.: Earth system science/modeling, ecology, geography, geology, hydrology, or related discipline

Qualifications: Applicants must meet one of the following qualifications: Research Ecologist , Research Geographer, Research Geologist, Research Hydrologist, Research Physical Scientist

(This type of research is performed by those who have backgrounds for the occupations stated above. However, other titles may be applicable depending on the applicant's background, education, and research proposal. The final classification of the position will be made by the Human Resources specialist.)

Research Advisor(s): Sarah Shafer, (541) 750-7412, sshafer@usgs.gov ; Steve Hostetler, (541) 737-8928, swhostet@usgs.gov

Human Resources Office contact: Erica Settlemyer, (916) 278-9383, esettlemyer@usgs.gov

Summary of Opportunities