2024 FATES Tutorial Announcement

[glemieux]

We are very excited to welcome applications for the 2024 FATES tutorial. This will be an in person event hosted at the Lawrence Berkeley National Lab in Berkeley, California, USA, between September 9th and September 13th.

The goals of the tutorial are to introduce people to the vegetation demographic model FATES, and get people running FATES on their personal computers. FATES is a model that predicts ecosystem structure and function for global change applications, and can be run across a wide range of configurations from global coupled carbon cycle-climate models (E3SM, CESM, NorESM) to single-site simulations. We will cover setting up single point runs at new sites, initializing with inventory data, analyzing outputs, and exploring parameter uncertainty. Please also let us know in the application form if there is a topic you’d like to see covered involving running FATES at a single site.

We will try to cover travel and accommodation costs for as many participants as possible, but will prioritize funding international attendees. If you have any of your own funding available to cover attendance please let us know in the registration form.

Who should apply?

Anyone with an interest in learning about how they can use FATES in their research is welcome to apply. No prior experience with FATES or other vegetation demographic models is required, but proficiency with Python or R is essential and experience with basic bash is helpful. Experience working with containerized applications (such as using docker desktop) is helpful, but not required as we will provide an orientation to using such tools. We particularly encourage applications from field scientists, graduate students, and early career scientists.

How to apply

Please fill in this application form which will ask for a one page CV and a short (250 max) description of the questions you are interested in answering using FATES. The deadline to apply is February 23rd. We will notify successful applicants by mid-March.

Pre-tutorial tasks

We will be working with a containerized version of FATES that can run on individual laptops. We will provide detailed instructions to help participants install docker and download tutorial containers on their machines prior to the workshop.

For applicants who would like to run FATES using inventory data, there will be some pre-tutorial work that we will guide you through in order to format data in a way that can be read by FATES. We respect the data sharing policies of plot networks. Data will not be shared between workshop participants or hosts and will remain on participants' personal computers. Please contact Jessica Needham if you have any questions about data usage.

This tutorial is supported as part of the Next Generation Ecosystem Experiments-Tropics (NGEE-T), funded by the U.S. Department of Energy, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research and the Alliance for Tropical Forest Science (ATFS), funded by the US National Science Foundation. NGEE-T and ATFS are committed to contributing to a safe, respectful, and welcoming environment that values personal integrity, mutual respect, collaboration, and diversity. Tutorial participants will be expected to follow the NGEE-Tropics code of conduct.

[glemieux]

To subscribe for email updates and future announcements please join our google group. You may also ask questions here or email the tutorial team directly at [email protected].