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Jeffrey Kerby

AIAS FORMER FELLOW

Current position: Postdoc, Department of Biology - Ecoinformatics and Biodiversity, Aarhus University, Denmark

During his AIAS-COFUND Fellowship, Postdoc Jeffrey Kerby worked on the project 'The many scales of Artic ecological dynamics: confronting contradictions and gaps with new tech'.

Project description

The Arctic is warming at twice the global average, a dynamic amplified by rapid declines in regional sea ice cover.  Despite compelling signals of biome-scale terrestrial responses, fundamental knowledge gaps about the rate, magnitude, and drivers of these dynamics in the tundra remain widespread.  

At AIAS, I will explore how scale, and its pervasive influence on pattern, influences regional and local measures of plant and animal response to climatic and/or biotic disturbances.

With emerging satellite datasets and AI approaches, one aspect of my project will examine weather-mediated and time-delayed linkages between marine cryosphere and terrestrial ecological dynamics across candidate regions of tundra. 

At the landscape level, variability in the life history progression of individual plants ultimately drives broader-scale dynamics.  I will investigate the structure of and landscape controls on this variability using collaborative datasets derived from drones and time-lapse cameras.  Using computer vision approaches, these image sets will be mined for data comprising tens-of-thousands of individual-level plant life cycles. These in turn will allow for investigation into new, yet fundamental, questions about plant life-history variation through space.  

 

Project title:

The many scales of Arctic ecological dynamics: confronting contradictions and gaps with new tech  

Area of research:

Ecology & Geography

Fellowship period:

1 Feb 2020 - 31 Jan 2023

Fellowship type

AIAS-COFUND II Marie Skłodowska-Curie fellow

This fellowship has received funding from the European Union’s Horizon 2020 research and innovation programme under the Marie Skłodowska-Curie grant agreement No 754513 and The Aarhus University Research Foundation.