Low protein diets could benefit the sea

“It turns out that many of us don’t need as much protein as we eat, and that has repercussions for our health and aquatic ecosystems. If we could reduce that to an amount appropriate to our health, we could better protect our environmental resources”

UC Davis researcher Maya Almaraz talks about her NCEAS postdoc project that was recently published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment.

Better data during disasters

“In the hours and days following a catastrophic hurricane’s landfall, humanitarian responders face numerous challenges. Sifting through disjointed and complex data sets should not be one of them.”

The KnowWhereGraph project, sponsored by the National Science Foundation, is a collaborative project that includes NCEAS and Direct Relief.

DEIJ Resource of the Month

Climate Change and Colonialism
Syllabus from Assistant Instructional Professor Matthew Henry
This open access syllabus provides educators and learners with resources around climate science and historically inequitable power dynamics upheld by colonialism.

SciComm Resource of the Month

Free Logo Maker
AI Generated Logos by Adobe Express
Brainstorm or create logos in minutes! We love this creative platform to explore individual or team science branding. Note: you will need to sign up for an account, but the service is free.

Data Science Resource of the Month

Shifting from Raster to Terra
Tutorial by Juliet Cohen
Want to adapt to recent changes in R spatial packages? This guide from an NCEAS Ocean Health Index fellow covers how to change your workflow from {Raster} to {Terra}.

Scientist Spotlight:
Carmen Galaz García,
Data Scientist

“On the last stretch of my PhD in mathematics, I decided to refocus my work to relate to the environmental challenges I read through daily. Through my work at NCEAS, I can now leverage my coding and analytical skills to advance environmental goals and help others use programming tools to further their ecological research.”

Synthesis Spotlight:
CA Marine Protected Area Decadal Assessment

California is conducting its first decadal management review of the marine protected area (MPA) network, as part of the Marine Life Protection Act established in 1999. The NCEAS working group has gathered experts in MPA science, ecology, and socio-economics to synthesize data for informed management recommendations.

Opportunities at NCEAS

Course | Data Management for Qualitative and Quantitative Arctic Research
Apply by October 10th
This five day short course at NCEAS in downtown Santa Barbara will cover an intro to programming in R, steps for data documentation, and ethical research practices. There will be special attention towards qualitative and sensitive data.

RFP | LTER Working Group Request for Proposals
Apply by October 12, 2022
The Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network office at NCEAS is seeking proposals to fund 2-4 working groups to synthesize over 40 years of time-resolved ecological and environmental data across a range of ecosystem types!

RFP | MEDS Capstone Request for Proposals
Apply by October 14, 2022
The Bren School at UCSB is looking for agencies, companies, individuals, or organizations facing environmental challenges to submit projects for the next cohort in our Masters of Environmental Data Science program.

Free Virtual Course | Reproducible Approaches to Arctic Research using R
Apply by October 31, 2022
This 5 day remote workshop (February 27- March 3) teaches Arctic researchers data management best practices, highlights tools for cleaning and analyzing data, and outlines concrete steps and methods for documenting and preserving data at the Arctic Data Center.

Papers We’re Reading

Averting wildlife-borne infectious disease epidemics requires a focus on socio-ecological drivers and a redesign of the global food system
eClinicalMedicine
How does climate change impact pandemics like COVID-19? This NCEAS and SNAPP led review examines links between wildlife-originating diseases and ecological crises.

High exposure of global tree diversity to human pressure
PNAS
Tree diversity is essential for ecosystem function, but we know little about their state of protection - until an NCEAS working group synthesized data from over 46,000 species.

A call for clean code to effectively communicate science
Methods in Ecology and Evolution
This perspectives piece, coauthored by an NCEAS Senior Fellow, encourages biologists to borrow best practices from software engineers to better document code.

The historical ecology of Coastal California
Ocean & Coastal Management
Humans have had profound impacts in California for over 13,000 years. This paper, led by NCEAS Deputy Director, leverages historical data for millennia-scale ecological assessments.