Achievement

This year Jay Hodgson completed his interdisciplinary, inter-regional dissertation project that used lake sediment cores to investigate long-term climate and land-use change in regions of different climate. His study was the first paleolimnology project to use a new statistical analysis tool (significant zero crossings = SiZer) that identifies significant changes in ecological data by diminishing noise and the likelihood of false data modes. SiZer is a threshold estimator that elucidates true modality by approximating a response function and its derivative. This approach was valuable to his research because it showed that environmental change varied by region in both forcing mechanism and timing of change. Specifically, temperature change was not the driving force in all of his study regions. His research results using SiZer were presented at a May 2009 professional society meeting and are in a manuscript submitted for publication.