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Browsing by Author "Wynne, Jacob H."

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    Predicting Spring Phenology in Deciduous Broadleaf Forests: NEON Phenology Forecasting Community Challenge
    Wheeler, Kathryn I.; Dietze, Michael C.; LeBauer, David; Peters, Jody A.; Richardson, Andrew D.; Ross, Arun A.; Thomas, R. Quinn; Zhu, Kai; Bhat, Uttam; Munch, Stephan; Buzbee, Raphaela Floreani; Chen, Min; Goldstein, Benjamin; Guo, Jessica; Hao, Dalei; Jones, Chris; Kelly-Fair, Mira; Liu, Haoran; Malmborg, Charlotte; Neupane, Naresh; Pal, Debasmita; Shirey, Vaughn; Song, Yiluan; Steen, McKalee; Vance, Eric A.; Woelmer, Whitney M.; Wynne, Jacob H.; Zachmann, Luke (Elsevier, 2024-01-01)
    Accurate models are important to predict how global climate change will continue to alter plant phenology and near-term ecological forecasts can be used to iteratively improve models and evaluate predictions that are made a priori. The Ecological Forecasting Initiative's National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) Forecasting Challenge, is an open challenge to the community to forecast daily greenness values, measured through digital images collected by the PhenoCam Network at NEON sites before the data are collected. For the first round of the challenge, which is presented here, we forecasted canopy greenness throughout the spring at eight deciduous broadleaf sites to investigate when, where, and for what model type phenology forecast skill is highest. A total of 192,536 predictions were submitted, representing eighteen models, including a persistence and a day of year mean null models. We found that overall forecast skill was highest when forecasting earlier in the greenup curve compared to the end, for shorter lead times, for sites that greened up earlier, and when submitting forecasts during times other than near budburst. The models based on day of year historical mean had the highest predictive skill across the challenge period. In this first round of the challenge, by synthesizing across forecasts, we started to elucidate what factors affect the predictive skill of near-term phenology forecasts.
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    Uncertainty in projections of future lake thermal dynamics is differentially driven by lake and global climate models
    Wynne, Jacob H.; Woelmer, Whitney M.; Moore, Tadhg N.; Thomas, R. Quinn; Weathers, Kathleen C.; Carey, Cayelan C. (PeerJ, 2023-06-02)
    Freshwater ecosystems provide vital services, yet are facing increasing risks from global change. In particular, lake thermal dynamics have been altered around the world as a result of climate change, necessitating a predictive understanding of how climate will continue to alter lakes in the future as well as the associated uncertainty in these predictions. Numerous sources of uncertainty affect projections of future lake conditions but few are quantified, limiting the use of lake modeling projections as management tools. To quantify and evaluate the effects of two potentially important sources of uncertainty, lake model selection uncertainty and climate model selection uncertainty, we developed ensemble projections of lake thermal dynamics for a dimictic lake in New Hampshire, USA (Lake Sunapee). Our ensemble projections used four different climate models as inputs to five vertical one-dimensional (1-D) hydrodynamic lake models under three different climate change scenarios to simulate thermal metrics from 2006 to 2099. We found that almost all the lake thermal metrics modeled (surface water temperature, bottom water temperature, Schmidt stability, stratification duration, and ice cover, but not thermocline depth) are projected to change over the next century. Importantly, we found that the dominant source of uncertainty varied among the thermal metrics, as thermal metrics associated with the surface waters (surface water temperature, total ice duration) were driven primarily by climate model selection uncertainty, while metrics associated with deeper depths (bottom water temperature, stratification duration) were dominated by lake model selection uncertainty. Consequently, our results indicate that researchers generating projections of lake bottom water metrics should prioritize including multiple lake models for best capturing projection uncertainty, while those focusing on lake surface metrics should prioritize including multiple climate models. Overall, our ensemble modeling study reveals important information on how climate change will affect lake thermal properties, and also provides some of the first analyses on how climate model selection uncertainty and lake model selection uncertainty interact to affect projections of future lake dynamics.