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Katz Lab Projects

Habitat Restoration in the Pacific Northwest

We continue a decades-long project to evaluate large-scale decision making in habitat management across the Pacific Northwest using applied semantics and ecoinformatics to ask questions such as “are we being efficient or effective with the billions of dollars spent on habitat restoration in the last 20 years?”  This project applies the same observational experiment, research approach one would apply to the ecological response to management actions to the management decisions themselves.

Local-scale climate variability impacts

We are continuing projects that use data confederation methods to evaluate how short-term climate variability affects local regional eco-systems and human-natural coupled systems, such as how fluctuations in the atmospheric jet stream may have affected bloom dynamics in phytoplankton in the World’s largest lake.  Our current project is evaluating the changing frequency of extreme events may have affected regional fisheries and other maritime activity on the US West Coast?

Statistical modelling of multivariate time series

We are currently developing new multivariate statistical tools for the analysis of ecological communities that reveal quantitative measures of the interactions of creatures with each other and their environment, and also quantitative measures of overall ecosystem stability in the face of perturbations such as management actions or climate variability. These projects continue our synthesis of dynamical mechanical testing techniques to ecological time series.

Conceptual Modelling of the FEW Nexus

We are beginning a new, NSF-funded program in applied epistemology and conceptual analysis examining the dynamics, trade-offs and stability at the Nexus of Food, Energy and Water systems in the Columbia River Basin as part of a larger collaboration on resilience in the provisioning capacity of the Pacific Northwest.  We are trying to develop conceptual frameworks and tools that allow the analysis of case studies of food-energy-water crises to inform more general and portable understanding of these challenging and increasingly frequent problems.

R Working Group

At WSU we have a breadth of research questions being addressed with R, an open source statistical environment. Successful learning and use of R requires community involvement, knowledge sharing, and collaboration. The R Working Group, sponsored by CEREO, is WSU’s R community, offering  weekly meetings across a variety of topic, skill levels, and interdisciplinary peer to peer learning.