Deciphering Weather Information in the complex and ever-changing world of Social Media

This Storm Spotter Training Workshop is the official training session for our Lancaster County Storm Spotters. However, even if you are not one of the county storm spotters, we highly encourage you, your family and your friends to attend and to become better prepared for the severe weather that visits our area. There will be many interesting videos and photos shown by the speaker.

Mike Olbinski is a photographer and filmmaker specializing in the raw power of nature. He chases storms across the United States, capturing incredible supercells, tornadoes, dust storms and lightning. His work has won an Emmy and has been featured in work by Marvel (Thor: The Dark World), Discovery, ESPN, Nat Geo, and dozens of others in the industry. His work has been viewed by millions of people around the world (over 5 million alone on Vimeo) and he has received several honors/ rewards at internationally-acclaimed film festivals. He has perfected the art of storm timelapse in a way no other storm chaser or photographer has done, and is leading the way in high-speed weather animation and film-making. See link: https://vimeo.com/174312494

Zach Sharpe, one of the rising stars in weather social media, has been storm chasing for over 10 years and works year-round as a Storm Chaser for KCCI Television Des Moines. He has covered several tornadoes, historic blizzards with thundersnow and a hurricane live on KCCI. He also serves as the President of the Iowa Storm Chasing Network. He has appeared on The Discovery Channel, Fox News, and featured in the Red Bull Television Series "Heart and Hands: Beyond the Job." Zach is passionate about the dissemination of real time and accurate weather information without allowing shares, likes, or hype to influence a forecast. Please join Zach and special guests as he takes you into the world of social media/ online marketing, and explains how positive and accurate commutation of weather hazards can truly make a difference in your community.

Streams and rivers provide many ecosystem services to humans, including water filtration, flood protection, and recreation among other benefits. In the agricultural Midwest, the impact of human land-use can degrade these freshwater ecosystems and limit their ability to deliver the same degree of services as streams flowing through watersheds with more natural land-use, such as prairies or forests. The Raccoon River is a socially and economically important river in Central Iowa. However, the high nitrate loads led the Des Moines Water Works to bring a lawsuit against upstream drainage districts over the river's water quality. My recent research has explored the variation in nitrate export and loss within the Raccoon River across space and through time. In addition, we have investigated the ecological value of land conservation as reflected by stream ecosystem function. Together, these studies seek to inform the management of river and streams in human-dominated landscapes.

CubeSats

Oct. 31, 2018 Seminar

Marra’s book tells the story of the threats free-ranging cats pose to biodiversity and public health throughout the world. His lecture will trace the historical and cultural ties between humans and cats from early domestication to the current boom in pet ownership, along the way accessibly explaining the science of extinction, population modeling and feline diseases.

Spring 2018 Water Seminar Series, 'Williams Lecture'

Spring Water Seminar Series 2018

Ecological and evolutionary processes are often assumed to operate at different temporal scales. Most ecological research assumes that species characteristics are static over scales of ecological interest (e.g. days, years, or even decades). However, a considerable amount of research now suggests that ecological and evolutionary processes operate on similar scales and often interact with implications for the role organisms play in an ecosystem. In this presentation, Dr. Thomas will highlight research results that illustrate how local adaptation (a) influences the phenotypic traits and ecological roles of fish in Trinidadian streams and (b) leads to higher species turnover of aquatic insects along tropical elevation gradients relative to temperate latitudes. The selective pressures on all species change as species are gained and loss and both invading and resident species can face intense selective pressures following community changes. As time since invasion progresses and phenotypes adjust to new selective regimes, trait-mediated interactions between organisms and their environment also change. We have been examining this process using Trinidadian guppies (Poecilia reticulata) and their native ecosystems on the island of Trinidad. This work builds upon extensive prior research demonstrating rapid phenotypic change in guppies in response to the presence or absence of predators. In this presentation, we summarize the results of a large collaborative effort to examine ecological consequences of these changes using a suite of approaches that vary in their complexity. The second portion of this presentation will examine whether aquatic insect taxa have great species turnover along elevation gradients in Ecuador versus Colorado and whether differences are predicted by the thermal biology of resident species. In essence, this works tests Janzen's classic hypothesis regarding "Why mountain passes are higher in the tropics" and whether it holds for aquatic insect populations. Briefly, our results indicate that tropical species have reduced thermal tolerance, narrower altitudinal ranges and greater species turnover with altitude than their temperate counterparts.