QUEST at Interagency Conference on Research in the Watersheds

30 September 2011.    Mary Beth Adams (USFS) gave a presentation on the QUEST research effort at the fourth annual Interagency Conference on Research in the Watersheds in Fairbanks, AK. Her presentation discussed the effort to quantify uncertainty in USFS watersheds throughout the US. You can view the presentation here.

QUEST Website Updates

There have been some exciting changes to the QUEST website in the last few weeks!

Relevant papers and Powerpoint presentations are now cataloged by topic area under the page called "Related Papers and Presentations on Uncertainty."

Additionally, we have added a section where you can find a catalog of QUEST articles, presentations, proposals, and workshop abstracts, as well as a section detailing QUEST papers that are currently in preparation. Check these out here.

QUEST meeting announcement in EOS

On June 28, 2011, EOS published an announcement of the first QUEST meeting, which was held in Boston on March 14-15, 2011. The meeting announcement describes the scope of current QUEST work and describes the goals of the QUEST research network. We're very excited about the interest that this article has generated among EOS readers! 

You can find a PDF of the meeting announcement here.

QUEST at ESA 2011

The QUEST group will be having dinner in Austin, TX on the evening of Monday, August 8, 2011.  We will post details of the time and location closer to the event. Please RSVP to quantifyinguncertainty (at) gmail (dot) com if you would like to join us!

Also, remember to check out our workshop, "Quantifying Uncertainty in Ecological Studies", (WK 18) on Sunday, August 7, from 1pm - 5pm, in room 12A of the Austin Convention Center. Participants in this workshop will gain hands-on experience exploring uncertainty analysis using Monte Carlo techniques.

QUEST at the North American Forest Ecology Workshop

On June 20, Dr. Mary Beth Adams (USDA FS, Fernow Experimental Forest) presented a QUEST poster at the North American Forest Ecology Workshop. The workshop, hosted this year by Virginia Tech. in Roanoke, VA, brought together researchers from the US, Mexico, and Canada for five days to discuss the topic "Forest Ecology in a Managed Landscape." The attendees at the conference include researchers, academicians, and managers.

The poster that Dr. Adams presented was titled "QUEST: Quantifying Uncertainty in Ecosystem Studies." The poster discussed sites included in the QUEST research network, an introduction to ecosystem uncertainty, and preliminary results of current work estimating uncertainty in hydrologic fluxes. Mary Beth had many visitors to the poster who showed lots of interest in the topic.

You can view the QUEST poster as an Powerpoint file here.

Uncertainty in predicting precipitation volume at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest: A model comparison

Quantifying the influx of water and elements to ecosystems via atmospheric deposition is uncertain mainly because of spatial variability; interpolation between precipitation stations is a major source of uncertainty at the ecosystem scale. Various methods of interpolation are used in precipitation and atmospheric deposition studies, but the uncertainty in the interpolation is rarely reported. Temporal dynamics generally contribute less uncertainty to estimates of deposition, because precipitation amounts are measured at short intervals (15 minute steps or shorter) or are cumulative, giving good estimates of rainfall amounts at a point. 

Dr. John Campbell (USDA Forest Service) used five models of precipitation volume in ARCGIS to demonstrate the difference in predictions of annual precipitation volume for five watersheds at the Hubbard Brook Experimental Forest. The models used were Thiessen polygons, Spline, Inverse Distance Weighting, Kriging, and regression using longitude and elevation as predictor variables. He found that model differences varied by watershed. The coefficient of variation between models was small, ranging from 0.24 - 0.83% of average annual precipitation.

Meeting on Statistical Issues in Forest Management held on 2-4 May, 2011

A meeting was held a few weeks ago in Québec City on statistics and forest management, with uncertainty as a central theme in most of the 20 or so invited talks. Tim Gregoire presented a fascinating opening talk about the unresolved issue of propagating jointly model uncertainty and sampling design uncertainty. Ron McRoberts presented a talk about variance estimation within a k-NN imputation exercise. The meeting ended on presentations by Bruce Borders and Annika Kangas on the opportunity costs associated with uncertainties in forest inventories. The presentation pdfs are on the meeting web site: http://www.crm.umontreal.ca/Forest11/horaire_e.php

- Courtesy of Pierre Bernier
Canadian Forest Service
Laurentian Forestry Centre
Quebec, Canada