Latest from ACEAS.

Several new groups have started their analysis and synthesis activitivities, and news of them can be found on the Science and Synthesis page of this web site.

They include Tania Laity from the Australian Natural Heritage Assessment Tool who is bringing a group of experts together to talk about Integrating Measures of phyogenetic and taxonomic diversity and endemism into national conservation assessment.

Groups that are winding up include the Pyrogeography group who had their last meeting in December at the same time as the C&N Dynamics group. Their meeting reports will shortly be loaded into their Science and Synthesis page.

But one of the latest pieces of news is of the upcoming Great ACEAS Workshop and Debate, on the issues that have emerged from the groups tackling Extinctions and Landscape Transformation in the first two rounds of ACEAS. You will see some hard work has been going on around gathering the facts, testing models and predictions, and putting these groups together should produce a super-synthesis. The event will be held at the Science Exchange in Adelaide, the home of the Royal Institution of Australia.

First paper submitted to a journal by an ACEAS Working Group, and a report of the meeting published in the on-line publication of the New Phytologist.

The Pyrogeography Working Group not only topped off their first meeting with a report for this web site (click here to read it) but followed this up with a meeting report submitted to the on-line branch of the journal New Phytologist. In addition they submitted a paper to another journal.

The outcomes of their first meeting included a system for identifying and describing major fire regime types, and reconciling phenomenological descriptions of fire regimes with conceptual models. Their results clearly showed that fire activity tracks seasonal dryness. The challenge for the next meeting is to determine how closely fire regime is linked to climate and other environmental variables and how this aligns with models in practice

Their next meeting is in December 2011, so we shall see how they progress towards their objective. A great start!

Data systems: semantics, data sharing, and documentation of analysis at the national and international scale–an NCEAS-ACEAS collaboration.

Between the 4 and 7 May 2010, a group of data integrators, data managers and eco-informatics specialists met at the Queensland University of Technology to discuss how can we best record, store and share data