Cory Craig
Cory is a graduate student at UCSB in the Department of Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology, and is a graduate intern at NCEAS. Cory is part of the Extinction Risk working group at NCEAS (PI's Sandy Andelman and Mark Burgman) which is examining the protocols used to classify species according to risk of extinction. The working group is measuring the performance of existing protocols with three different methods involving: simulation models, simulated data, and a retrospective analysis of extinction risk. Cory's internship project involves heading up the retrospective analysis. For this work she is collecting historic data on mammal, bird, and plant congener species pairs. These congener pairs consist of 1 species which has gone extinct in the last 200 years, and 1 which is still extant. The historic data will be used to rank the species according to each of the protocols at some time back in the past. If the protocols reliably identify the species at greatest risk of becoming extinct, this should result in more vulnerable ranks being assigned to the extinct species group. This research also serves as Cory's masters thesis.

Mike Sommers
I started working for John Alroy and the Phanerozoic Marine Paleofaunal Database in '98. My job is to collect from the literature, and enter data pertaining to, marine fossil localities and the taxa contained into a web-based database. With the funding of the new grant, the project is expanded in scope and called the Paleobiology Database, and I have moved on to creating a taxonomic database (authorites and synonymies, etc) for vertebrates starting with turtles and squamates, along with the locality and taxa contained. I'm a Ph. D. candidate in the Geological Sciences and hope to be finished by next summer.

Mike Asakawa
I am currently sponsered by a multi-stakeholder task force to assist with the development of a database at NCEAS for the MARINE project, a collaborative effort aimed at creating a rocky intertidal database for the southern California coast (from San Diego to San Luis Obispo). Specifically, I am implementing quality control checks on submitted data and helping test metadata tools that shall be used in the database.

I consider my work at NCEAS to be very valuable to my professional training because it has given me a very advanced and technical opportunity to deal with state-of-the-art tools used to handle ecological information.

Department: Bren School of Environmental Science and Management
Degree: MESM, expected June of 2001

Michael Jennings
Toward A Better Understanding Of Vegetation Alliances Dissertation Research
September 2000

Mapping species and habitat distributions across entire states and regions at scales useful to land managers, planners, and researchers is a recent innovation that relies first on mapping dominant types of vegetation from satellite imagery. While the description and classification of these vegetation types is itself recent, my research focuses on developing general theory of their ecology, and the products expected from this work are: (a) new basic ecological insights, (b) improved conceptual models of vegetation assembly, (c) a better understanding of vegetation alliances as a landscape patch, (d) greater utility of alliances as a unit of conservation assessment, and (e) advances in spatially explicit map based popular explanations about solutions to biodiversity loss.

This work relies on the integration of theoretical concepts as well as very large heterogeneous data sets and there are few, if any, other ecology research centers where both the intellectual and computing capabilities are as available as they are at NCEAS. This work could not have advanced to its present stage without the interaction and input from the vegetation, theoretical, and computational scientists from around the world who have been at NCEAS. The training from and exposure to some of the best minds in these fields that I have received as an intern have far exceeded my expectations.

My campus affiliation is with the Bren School of Environmental Science and Management. I expect to finish my degree in the next 12-18 months.

* For more information:
http://www.biogeog.ucsb.edu/people/jennings/proposal.pdf
jennings@nceas.ucsb.edu
805-893-5151

Michael D. Jennings, Ph.D. Graduate Student Intern *
National Center for Ecological Analysis and Synthesis
University of California, Santa Barbara

Parviez Hosseini
I am working on predator-prey spatial population models, and NCEAS has been of invaluable assistance to me. NCEAS has provided access to their computers, support and advice on programming, monetary support while I did work for both them and myself, and given me a chance to work with many of the top people in my field, who I would have never met otherwise. I am a PhD student in Ecology, Evolution, and Marine Biology.

Bill Kuhn
I'm a PhD student in Geography at UCSB working on valley oak. I am working at NCEAS with the Masting Dynamics working group headed by Dave Kelly, Victoria Sork, and Sandy Liebold. For the group I have been doing database management work.