Natasha Krell, Bryn Morgan, Drew Gower and Kelly Caylor, H042-01 – Consequences of variable rainfall on farming outcomes for dryland maize farmers, Oral Presentation, Tuesday, 8 December 2020, 07:00 – 07:04.
Anna Boser, Christian White and Mohammad Al-Hamdan, A061-0009 – Using Statistical and Machine Learning Models with Remotely Sensed Data to Estimate PM2.5 in the San Francisco Bay Area, Poster, Wednesday, 9 December 2020, 04:00 – 20:59.
Rachel Green, Kelly Caylor, Chris Funk and Dar Roberts, H094-07 – Seasonal Vegetation-Hydrological Coupling across Land Covers in East Africa (Invited), Oral Presentation, Thursday, 10 December 2020, 07:24 – 07:28.
Marcus Thomson and Emma Colven, GC068-0005 – Potential Avenues for Collaborative Research on Climate Modeling (Invited), Poster, Friday, 11 December 2020, 04:00 – 20:59.
]]>His first two chapters have been published in Food Security and Environmental Research Letters, respectively. He is working with his committee to submit his third chapter this month, which details a new globally-comprehensive and longitudinal fine-scale analysis of urban exposure of extreme heat.
He will join Columbia University in the fall of 2020 as an Earth Institute Postdoctoral Research Scientist.
]]>Cancelled fieldwork and travel, classes gone fully remote, and concerns about family, friends, and ourselves pose many twists and changes to our current reality.
Fortunately members of the WAVES lab find time to connect through virtual lab meetings. Our lab meetings have at times struggled to find a coherent thread given folks’ (often) disparate research topics. Now in a time of working from home and physical distancing, our lab meeting’s purpose has become more clear: Checking in and supporting each other.
We might not be able to do face-to-face meetings, happy hours or game nights for a while longer, but we still have our solid support group.
For whoever out there is reading this: We’re hanging in there and hope that you are too.
]]>Check out the list of oral and poster presentations, ordered by date.
Current Members
Kelly Caylor, Tom Evans, Lyndon Estes, Justin Sheffield, Noemi Vergopolan, Natasha Krell, Drew Gower and Zack Guido, H11B-05 – Linkages between water, vegetation, and livelihoods in Sub-Saharan drylands, Oral Presentation, Monday, December 9, 2019, 09:00 – 09:15, Moscone West - 3014, L3.
Elizabeth Forbes, Kelly Caylor, Truman Young, Mark Hirsch, Hillary Young, B21K-2342 – Animal, vegetable, mineral: Identifying the indirect effects of large vertebrate herbivores and land use on carbon cycling in a Kenyan savanna ecosystem, Poster, Tuesday, 10 December 2019, 13:40 – 18:00, Moscone South, Poster Hall.
Fernanda Ribeiro, Frank Davis, Dar Roberts, Kelly Caylor, Laura Hess, Gabriel Antunes Daldegan and Fernanda Thiesen Brum, GC23H-1445 – Is Forest Code legislation protecting Neotropical savanna habitats in agricultural landscapes? A high-resolution Gap analysis of the Brazilian Cerrado, Poster, Tuesday, 10 December 2019, 13:40 – 18:00, Moscone South, Poster Hall.
Natasha Krell, Frank Davenport, Seth Peterson, Shraddhanand Shukla, Gregory Husak, Will Turner, Chris Funk and Kelly Caylor, GC41H-1243 – To What Extent Does Climate Variability Explain Farmers’ Planting Decisions in Central Kenya?, Poster, Thursday, 12 December 2019, 08:00 – 12:20, Moscone South, Poster Hall.
Cascade Tuholske, Chris Funk, Kelly Caylor, Tom Evans and Stuart Sweeney, IN43B-09 – A Fine-Resolution, Global Comparison of Urban Exposure to Extreme Temperatures, Oral Presentation, Thursday, December 12, 2019, 15:24 – 15:36, Moscone West - 2020, L2.
Marc Mayes, Bryn Morgan, Kelly Caylor, Michael Bliss Singer, John Stella and Dar Roberts, GC51E-1108 – Monitoring dryland riparian vegetation water use and stress via ECOSTRESS, Poster, Friday, 13 December 2019, 08:00 – 12:20, Moscone South, Poster Hall.
Bryn Morgan, Marc Mayes and Kelly Caylor, B53P-2616 – Improved assessment of dryland riparian vegetation water use at leaf- to landscape-scales using unmanned aerial vehicle (UAV)-based thermal remote sensing, Poster, Friday, 13 December 2019, 13:40 – 18:00, Moscone South, Poster Hall.
Rachel Green, Kelly Caylor, Chris Funk and Dar Roberts, GC53B-06 – Drought Projection and Modeling Causal Feedbacks with Earth Observations in East Africa, Oral Presentation, Friday, 13 December 2019, 14:55 – 15:10, Moscone West - 2010, L2.
Marc Mayes, Marco Aurelio Acevedo Ortiz, Alisa White, Severiana Dominguez Gonzalez, Jose Leonardo Hernandez Montiel and Barbara Vallarino, PA53A-09 – Community-based forest monitoring with academic and nonprofit partners illuminates conservation priorities and economic opportunities in the Chinantla Rainforest, Oaxaca, Mexico, Oral Presentation, Friday, December 13, 2019, 15:00 – 15:10, Moscone South - 301-302, L3.
Alumni and Collaborators
Maria Warter, Michael Bliss Singer, Dar Roberts, Mark Cuthbert, Kelly Caylor, Romy Sabathier and John Stella, H12G-05 – Onset and Propagation of the 2012-2016 Drought in Southern California, Oral Presentation, Monday, December 9, 2019, 11:20 – 11:35, Moscone West - 3018, L3.
Elliot Chang, Aaron William Brewer, Dan Park, Yongqin Jiao and Laura Nielsen Lammers H21M-1938 – Dual porosity modeling of lanthanide separation using fixed-bed columns of bead-encapsulated, engineered Escherichia coli, Poster, Tuesday, December 10, 2019, 08:00 – 12:20, Moscone South, Poster Hall.
Romy Sabathier, Michael Bliss Singer, John Stella, Kelly Caylor and Dar Roberts, H33H-2026 – The greening and browning of the Arizona desert in response to climate-controlled water availability, Poster, Wednesday, 11 December 2019, 13:40 – 18:00, Moscone South, Poster Hall.
Lyndon Estes, Su Ye, Lei Song, Ryan Avery, Dennis McRitchie, Ronald Eastman, Stephanie Debats and Kelly Caylor, IN42A-04 – Improving maps of smallholder-dominated croplands through tight integration of human and machine intelligence, Oral Presentation, Thursday, December 12, 2019, 11:05 – 11:20, Moscone West - 2018, L2.
Adam Wolf, Danielle Watts, Loreli Carranza-Jimenez, Trenton Franz, Lyndon Estes, B42E-07 – Translational Agriculture: Data-driven insights into crop responses to genetics, environment and management that are readily applied to production agriculture, Oral Presentation, Thursday, December 12, 2019, 11:50 – 12:05, Moscone West - 3007, L3.
Noemi Vergopolan, Sitian Xiong, Justin Sheffield, Eric Wood, Tom Evans, Kelly Caylor and Lyndon Estes, H51H-1577 – The spatiotemporal scales of drought and its impacts on field-scale agricultural yields, Poster, Friday, 13 December 2019, 08:00 – 12:20, Moscone South, Poster Hall.
Frank Davenport, Shraddhanand Shukla, Gregory Husak, Chris Funk, Natasha Krell and Will Turner, GC51G-1148 – What is the Relationship between Late Start of Season and Grain Prices in African Countries?, Poster, Friday, 13 December 2019, 08:00 – 12:20, Moscone South, Poster Hall.
]]>Cascade Tuholske was awarded the President’s Dissertation Year Fellowship at UCSB. The award enables students to delve fully into their dissertation and aims to increase the number of students who contribute to UCSB’s diversity. Cascade will use this opportunity to continue his research focused on the relationship between urban population dynamics, climate change, and urban food security across Africa. Stay tuned, as he expects to have new publication demonstrating a novel method to measure urban population distributions in Africa out this summer.
To support her work studying the coupled dynamics of smallholder farming systems and climate variability in east Africa, Natasha Krell was awarded a Schmidt Environmental Solutions Award funded by The Schmidt Family Foundation. The award will support her dissertation work and science communication efforts. UCSB’s group of inaugural Schmidt Environmental Solutions Fellows were recently featured in the UCSB current. She was also awarded a Department of Defense Science, Mathematics, and Research for Transformation scholarship which will provide two years of support for her dissertation.
Ryan Avery & Bryn Morgan were awarded the high honor of Honorable Mention for the prestigious National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellowship Program. Bryn was also selected as a semi-finalist for the Fulbright Student Program to Namibia.
Congrats everyone!
]]>The 2018 rainy season in central Kenya has been anything but ordinary. While many farmers relished the above-average volumes of rainfall which they hope will lead to a productive growing season, other farmers suffered from the deluges that led to flooded fields and washed away crops.
The WAVES team, led by PhD student Natasha Krell, sought out to understand these questions surrounding agricultural decision-making using advances in real-time crop monitoring weather stations and social science surveys. Together with our instrumental Kenya-based team members, John Gitonga and Boniface Mukoma, the WAVES lab deployed ca. 60 field-based Arable Mark crop-monitoring weather stations as well as led social science surveys of over 600 farmers.
Research collaborations between the WAVES lab at U.C. Santa Barbara, the University of Arizona, the California Polytechnic State University, and the Mpala Research Center in Laikipia, Kenya culminated in a household survey on agricultural management, water resource governance, use of weather and climate forecasts, coping and adaptation to climate as well as other topics. The researchers gathered longitudinal data on over 600 heads of households or spouses in Laikipia, Meru and Nyeri counties.
As the NSF-WSC grant comes to an end in 2019, our research highlights advances in environmental data collection through a field-based sensor network along with farmer surveys to better understand how smallholders respond to climate variability. Our findings can provide insight on agricultural shocks such as crop failure or pest and disease occurence, and to what extent these shocks can be predicted and mitigated.
]]>The first position is in the area of riparian ecohydrological dynamics. The WAVES lab (caylor.eri.ucsb.edu) is participating in two multi-institutional projects that seek to develop novel insight into the the sustainability and resilience of riparian forest ecosystems and tools for quantitative support of land/water conservation management plans in arid and semi-arid landscapes across the southwestern US and southern France. Our project goals are to detect and assess the responses of sensitive riparian forests to drought stress over recent decades, and to generalize these responses through modeling of a warming/drying climate punctuated by variable rainfall.
A successful candidate’s duties would include, under supervision and within a multi-institution team environment: (1) developing and implementing landscape-scale models of riparian ecohydrology that incorporate stochastic dynamics of rainfall, surface/subsurface dynamics, plant water use and vegetation stress; (2) integrating and verifying model dynamics against multi-year meteorological data and isotopic records of riparian vegetation water sources; (3) leveraging high-resolution imagery of vegetation function and structure derived from unmanned autonomous vehicles for improved characterization of riparian ecohydrological dynamics.
Additional detail regarding this research effort can be found here. Interested individuals can appy here.
The second position is in the area of coupled natural-human system modeling. The WAVES lab (caylor.eri.ucsb.edu) is conducting research that seeks to reveal the dynamics of production and consumption of food, energy, and water resources in sub-Saharan Africa, and use these revelations to develop solutions that can better sustain coupled food, energy, and water systems through improved multi-scale, multi-resource governance.
A successful candidate’s duties would include, under supervision and within a multi-institution team environment: (1) developing and implementing models of coupled natural-human systems within smallholder agricultural settings; (2) integrating and verifying model dynamics against novel data sets of high-frequency, co-located in-situ observations of agricultural decision making and crop/climate dynamics; (3) leading the authorship of research manuscripts for publication based on model development and applications.
Additional detail regarding this research effort can be found at www.smallholder.ag. Interested individuals can apply here.
]]>Dr. Kwaw Andam, a research fellow at the International Food Policy Research Institutes’s (IFPRI) Ghana Strategy Support Program recently visited the WAVES lab and the Department of Geography at UCSB for a week of collaboration. Previously an economist for the World Bank, Dr. Andam’s research focuses on agro-processing, value chain analysis, and livestock production in Ghana. He and Cascade Tuholske conducted an urban food security survey in Accra in summer 2017 to assess the demographic, socioeconomic, and spatial predictors of household food security in low- and middle-income neighborhoods in Accra, Ghana’s capital. This research is supported by a Borlaug Fellowship in Global Food Security and IFPRI. While at UCSB, Dr. Andam assisted Cascade with data analysis and drafting of a paper that they plan to publish this spring. While much of his time was spent in the office, Dr. Andam still had time to visit local favorites such as Cold Springs Tavern and the Santa Barbara Harbor.
]]>