This Fall Webinar Series welcomes Dr. Robert Carver. He will give a guest presentation. His topic is on using JMP effectively to prepare data for analysis. Join this guest webinar. You will be entered in a drawing to receive a free copy of Dr. Carver’s new book, Preparing Data for Analysis in JMP.

Register and mark your calendar! Fall webcasts include:

Sept 20th at 11am ET: Teaching Introductory Statistics
Sept 26th at 10am ET: JMP Basics for Professors and Students
Oct 5th at 2pm ET: Data Summary and Analysis
Oct 11th at 12PM ET: Teaching Engineering Statistics
Oct 24th at 11am ET: Teaching ANOVA and Regression
Oct 26th at 12pm ET: JMP Integration with SAS, R, Matlab…
Oct 31st at 11am ET: Preparing Data for Analysis with JMP (Guest Speaker)
Nov 2nd 10am ET: JMP Basics for Professors and Students
Nov 7th at 12pm ET: Teaching Basic Predictive Modeling
Nov 9th at 12pm ET: Teaching Advanced Predictive Modeling
Nov 13th at 11am ET: Data Summary and Analysis
Nov 14th at 10am ET: Teaching Design of Experiments
Nov 20th at 12pm ET: Scientific Workflow in JMP: Creating Reproducible Analyses
Nov 28th at 10am ET: Visualization and Graphics
Dec 6th at 12pm ET: Multivariate Analysis and Advanced Visualization
Dev 12th at 12pm ET: Teaching Statistics in the Health and Life Sciences
Register now

Who should participate?

Any student, graduate student, or professor looking to enhance their analytics capabilities–no matter which country you’re based in.

What can I expect from a JMP data analysis webcast?

You’ll learn how to get the most out of JMP. You’ll also see how various features can make data analysis easier, faster and more fruitful overall.
For additional webinar details, click here.

Can”t make it to a webcast? Please visit the JMP/SAS Academic Webinar Library for recorded versions of webinars:

Stay tuned for more events and don”t hesitate to reach out with any questions.
Academic@JMP.com
877.594.6567
jmp.com/why

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A stark future awaits if we fail to act on climate change. (Credit: Wikimedia, Creative Commons Attribution-Share Alike 4.0 International license)

Why is a video infographic helpful?

It can be hard to visualize global temperature changes. For example, a simple line graph shows a single number changing over time. It doesn’t show the complex data comprising changes in the range of temperatures across the planet over time.

Who can use this video infographic of global warming?

Scientists, educators, teachers and students can benefit from a better way to communicate global temperature change. This video infographic accomplishes that. It shows temperature anomalies arranged by country from 1900 to 2016. The visualization based on GISTEMP data, maintained by NASA’s Goddard Institute for Space Studies. The video is available for download free-of-charge on Flickr (see below for download link).

How can I use this video infographic?

The video infographic is ideal to illustrate the increasing urgency of climate change. You can clearly see that over time, temperature anomaly frequency is increasing. No special data interpretation skills are needed. Since it is available as a download, it can be used offline. Therefore, presenters could include this in a digital slide presentation, for example. An educator could show the video to students and use it as a way to engage students in a discussion about global warming. It’s also a good opportunity to talk to students about the importance of data visualization. Edward Tufte’s book, The Visual Display of Quantitative Information, is an excellent primer on this topic.

A picture is worth a thousand words, it is said. Well, good data visualization can convey complex ideas more readily than words. With that in mind, I encourage you to make use of this resource and share widely with colleagues and fellow Biodiversity Professionals.

CREDIT AND DOWNLOAD LINK
Antti Lipponen: Temperature anomalies arranged by country 1900 – 2016.
DOWNLOAD (13.1 MB MP4 file)

The post Video infographic shows temperature anomalies increasing over time appeared first on Biodiversity Professionals.

State Vegetation Type Map for New South Wales (NSW), Australia. The map shows color-coded Plant Community Types (PCTs). Click for the full size image.

To better manage our native vegetation, the New South Wales government is delivering a comprehensive and complete state-wide baseline for the extent and distribution of the different groupings or types of vegetation – the State Vegetation Type Map (SVT Map).

The SVT is based on site surveys, a standard classification system and high resolution spatial representation. With a complete vegetation type map for NSW, for the first time government, business and the community will be able to see what we currently know about the distribution of Plant Community Types for all of NSW. This approach will provide a wide-ranging basis to set conservation priorities instead of just localized and incomplete information.

Plant Community Types (PCTs) are the agreed foundation level for classifying vegetation in NSW and are intended to provide the most ecologically relevant grouping of plant species for a range of purposes not just mapping. For example, site assessments will use this classification unit to describe the vegetation present and compare their current condition with related benchmarks.

Plant communities are complex and dynamic entities that can be challenging to map or even recognize on the ground especially where they have been significantly modified through clearing or logging. Some closely related PCTs can share common species or differ by a particular layer. Boundaries between types are not always distinct. Our understanding of PCTs will continue to change as more site survey data is collected especially in poorly sampled areas.

With the support of the NSW Environmental Trust, a major project was initiated to accelerate the creation of a complete and consistent reference layer for the extent and distribution of the approximately 1300 (PCTs) in NSW–the State Vegetation Type Map.

The State Vegetation Map cannot be expected to be a perfect and timeless representation of the landscape. Rather, it is designed to provide a common basis for vegetation information in NSW that can be readily updated without the need for producing entirely new maps. The underlying skeleton can more easily incorporate new site information and more detailed special-purpose vegetation maps (where compatible) to continuously improve the state wide picture.

For more information about vegetation information please visit our website at: http://www.environment.nsw.gov.au/vegetation/vinfo.htm

Bob Denholm
Senior Team Leader Vegetation Mapping
Native Vegetation Information Science Branch
Science Division
Office of Environment and Heritage

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Up to now, conservationists (and their donors) have assumed that conserving the maximum biodiversity also stores the most carbon. It’s supposedly a win-win. But two new studies turn this assumption its head.

In a July 2015 paper in Nature, the authors report that only a few “hyperdominant” species are responsible for most of the carbon stored in biomass, based on research in the Amazon rainforest. (Mongabay’s article on the Amazon carbon sequestration study provides a good synopsis of the paper.)

This work is consistent with another study on REDD and biodiversity published in Conservation Biology. This research highlights how meeting REDD+ targets will not substantially support biodiversity conservation. (The study is summarized in a blog article on the CIFOR website.)

The conclusion? Preserving the most species by leaving rainforest intact, or attempting to restore original biodiversity to degraded areas, is not the most efficient way to store carbon. That carbon would otherwise enter the atmosphere and contribute to global warming.

The findings present conservation organizations with a conundrum, especially those that emphasize carbon storage as a benefit of biodiversity conservation. Do they carry on business as usual, hoping that their donors and the public won’t care about the science? That would be disingenuous, if not dishonest. A better approach would be to switch focus and emphasize the importance of biodiversity conservation in its own right.

I’ve never been a big fan of tying biodiversity conservation to carbon storage because conflating the two amounts to a compromise that neither benefits conservation in the long run, nor significantly reduces carbon emissions. Indeed, paying a conservation organization to “offset” our personal carbon emissions simply assuages our guilt. Directly minimizing our personal carbon footprint by driving less and reducing power consumption is much more effective and empowering.

The point here is that carbon is essentially an economic and political problem, not a conservation problem. There are many ways to reduce emissions before we ever need conservation to be part of the solution. So should conservation organizations completely disentangle themselves from the carbon offset business? It may well be time to do so.

References
Sophie Fauset, S. et al. (2015) Hyperdominance in Amazonian forest carbon cycling. Nature Communications 6: 6857 doi:10.1038/ncomms7857
Murray, J. P. et al. (2015) Spatial patterns of carbon, biodiversity, deforestation threat, and REDD+ projects in Indonesia. Conservation Biology DOI: 10.1111/cobi.12500

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