Earth Lab EDS Seminar: Sarah Elmendorf, INSTAAR

Earth Lab's Environmental Data Science weekly seminar series
Title: Biodiversity and climate change through a big data lens
Speaker: Sarah Elmendorf, INSTAAR
Abstract: Climate change has the potential to impact multiple aspects of biodiversity, from species diversity, to composition and ecosystem function. With rates of warming nearly four times faster than the rest of the planet, the tundra biome is among the most vulnerable ecosystems to climate change. In this talk, I examine climate change impacts on different aspects of biodiversity, and how big data can -- or can't -- be effectively used to address these questions in this remote region.
Bio: Sarah Elmendorf is an ecologist in the Institute of Arctic and Alpine Research (INSTAAR) and the Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology at the University of Colorado. Her work focuses on climate change impacts on biodiversity and phenology, integrating long-term observations, experiments and big data. She has led multiple international ecological synthesis projects, with a particular focus on plants of the tundra biome. She received her PhD from the University of California at Davis, and subsequently worked as a postdoc at the University of British Columbia, a staff scientist in the data products group at NEON, and information manager for the Niwot Ridge LTER program. Despite being described as a "data thief" once upon a time, she spends most of her time trying to give data away.