ISEECI

Institute for the Study of Ecological and Evolutionary Climate Impacts

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Greetings from the Directors!

Welcome to ISEECI and our first ISEECI newsletter.

The past year has been incredibly busy and exciting, so we did not get this newsletter off the ground as soon as we had hoped. We hope to do this bi-monthly, please send us stories and updates about your research so it can featured. 

Since hearing that we got the UC-Catalyst award in mid-December 2014, we: organized an Executive Board that met in January; set up several disciplinary-related working groups; got the GSR process moving/funded so that each campus has already had their GSR support in 2015; advertised and hired 4 Postdocs (though one position is still in negotiation); and held a very successful workshop at the end of September that helped to identify key ISEECI themes  that some of the wide variety of researchers who are interested in ISEECI and its success can coalesce around and move forward in the next few years. And critical to our progress and success, we hired Dr. Becca Fenwick as the Research Director – she has better administrative and IT skills and more time than either of us could give.

Since the ISEECI award is a catalyst grant – we need to invest time and effort to growing the program by getting more funds now and into the future so that we can keep research going for a long time and continue this 9-campus effort. To this end, we have already secured some NSF funding, and have moved forward on other grant opportunities; these are all detailed in the Annual Report. But this effort needs to include all of you to make it work – not just the directors and those on the Working Groups.

So, why you should want to participate in ISEECI:

  • Enhancing the UC-NRS by linking projects across multiple reserves, making the system even more valuable than the sum of the individual parts.
  • Working with top-notch, UC scientists to develop important climate-change research, sharing ideas, methodologies, hypothesis testing and designing experiments that enables regional-scale understanding of climate impacts.
  • Rapid access to data from our website from around the NRS system (climate data, and research data as they become available).
  • Access to graduate student and postdoc support
  • Access to workshops (virtual, real) to develop and expand your ideas

Here’s what you need to do in return:

  • Apply for grants as ISEECI members – this means adding a nominal ISEECI administrative cost to help pay for the Research Coordinator, data upload and storage, website, etc.
  • Join working groups and workshops – share with others interested in the same big problems
  • Consider being one of your campus reps on the Exec Board – we don’t meet frequently and need only one rep per campus each time. The Exec Board helps with the big decisions and assigns campus committees to vet the GSRs.
  • Give your support to your campus administration to contribute to ISEECI; we are requesting 10K per year from each campus to help with administrative costs. To date, several campuses have joined on and we are waiting to hear from the others. Please get touch with your ISEECI campus rep if you can help. 
  • Decide on the placement of new microenvironmental sensors being added to 12 UC-NRS sites and participate in the construction of this exciting ecophysiological data network

The list of grant proposals that we are currently developing or funded:

Macrosystems (due March 15th) – From Trout to Trees; novel combinations of many different climate proxies across the west utilizing paleo to modern climate records to regionally understand climate history and model detailed future climate.

RCN – (in prep) Networking University Reserves, Preserves, Field Stations, Marine Labs across the state with ISEECI (UC and CSU).

IMSL – (in prep) Next Generation Genomic Digitization of Collections, what can they tell us about the last 150 years of change, population sizes and genetic information?

FSML: funded, $444,961 jointly with Northern Arizona University – Collaborative Research: Ecophysiological Instruments for Measuring Biotic Climate Impacts Across Western Field Stations.

Although the deadlines are coming up, we welcome more participation from those of you who want to have a say in how they develop…..so let Becca (bfenwick@ucsc.edu) know of your interests and she will make sure you get into the loop with those who are working on those proposals now.

The call has gone out for the 2016 GSR support, please contact your local ISEECI rep if you have students who would be a good fit, or if you would like to help out. 

This Newsletter is rather long because we had so much to share, but we are hoping to do shorter updates each month in future.

Thanks for helping to make ISEECI a success.

Best for the new year!

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ISEECI Director Laurel Fox

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ISEECI Director Barry Sinervo

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