This past week I started working for the Great Basin Landscape Ecology Lab at the university as a full time researcher. The lab is headed by Dr. Peter Weisberg and is comprised of postdoctoral researchers, graduate students, and undergraduate students. Peter has a variety of field studies going on at this point, most of them are scattered across California, Nevada, Utah, and Arizona. The project that I'm going to be working on is the Walker River Basin project, which investigates the ecological implications of changing land use in the Walker River Basin. The goal of the project is to identify changes in land use that might result in putting water back into Walker Lake, which at present, is rapidly disappearing. My tasks involve using GIS and spatial modeling to scale up plot-level studies in order to estimate evapotranspiration, net primary productivity, biomass, etc. for the basin under different potential land use scenarios.
You can view my new web page and CV at:
http://www.cabnr.unr.edu/weisberg/people/tom.htm
