First Year Book 2007 - The Ravaging Tide

Climate Change, Conservation, Energy Research Opportunities

Project Title	Laboratory	Description
Reproductive asynchrony, population density and extinction risk	Biology Department	The goal of this project is to search for a connection between reproductive asynchrony, a life history trait that occurs when individuals in a population are reproductively active for only a portion of the population-level breeding period, and population density. A previous theoretical study showed that reproductive asynchrony could cause a population to go extinct if density was low. The results suggested that high population density could buffer a population against the negative effects of asynchrony. Here we seek to test that prediction with empirical data on the relationship between degree of asynchrony and population density from a range of naturally occurring populations.
Spatial Ecology and Conservation of Animals	Biology Department	We are trying to understand how the populations of the animals are changing, what factors influence those changes (or might influence them in the future), and what role spatial processes and distributions play in their ecology and the resulting patterns of biodiversity.
Spatial Rarity of Desert Fishes	Biology Department	Conservation biologists often think of extinction in terms of a declining number of individuals within a population. My project instead takes spatial perspective on extinction, focusing on the analysis of existing museum datasets to understand how populations of native fish species were historically distributed throughout Arizona and how those distributions have decayed over time. One part of this project involves quantitative analyses of occurrence patterns, whereas another involves the construction of a database of biological life history traits from the scientific literature.
Understanding the Dynamics of Extinction	Biology Department	This project seeks to use mathematical models and computer simulations to understand how populations of species go extinct. The student would be responsible for developing a database of species that have actually gone extinct (altogether or from specific localities), paying particular attention to what was known about the commonness or rarity of the species prior to extinction. This is harder than it seems, but preliminary efforts (we have 7 time series) show some really interesting patterns.
Understanding plant growth, development and survival through studies of ion homeostasis	Biology Department	Understanding plant growth, development and survival through studies of ion homeostasis. Plant growth, development, and survival depend on the uptake, translocation, and sorting of essential nutrients and exclusion of toxic ions. However, the molecular bases for these regulated transport processes are largely unknown. The first complete genome sequence of a plant, large mutant collections and extensive databases provide opportunities to discover the functions of over 1000 transporters in Arabidopsis. The major objectives are to determine the biological roles of Ca and proton pumps, and H+-coupled ion transporters. These studies are important for strategies to improve stress tolerance and male fertility in reproduction.
Surface Temperature Changes	Atmospheric and Oceanic Sci.	Funded by NSF, we will analyze how surface temperature changes over land in the past 30 years. We need to analyze satellite observations.
Climate Change Research	Meterology	Several projects available. Please see link for more details.
Climate Links Between Remote Regions	Atmospheric and Oceanic Sci.	The term teleconnection is used in atmospheric sciences to describe the climate links between geographically separated regions. The remote region need not exhibit fluctuations of the same sign in order to be "teleconnected." In fact, the interesting teleconnections often involve contemporaneous variations of opposite signs. For example, winter variations in temperature and rainfall over southern Europe and the Iberian peninsula are frequently opposite to those over northwestern Europe and Scandinavia; the underlying variability pattern is called the North Atlantic Oscillation. The North American winters are, in fact, influenced by a number of teleconnnection patterns, including the one excited by the El Nino related warming of tropical Pacific sea-surface temperatures.
Combustion, Air Pollution, Efficient Engines	Mechanical Engineering	Laboratory assistant for research in combustion and air pollution, efficient engines and efficient use of fossil fuels.