Hi GEM team,

Here is a nice introduction on the work we are carrying out on El Niño by Laura Cole, a journalist from Geographical magazine: http://geographical.co.uk/places/forests/item/2149-research-blog-the-tropics-and-el-nino

Laura will be following our work on El Niño for a few months. If you have stories from your fieldwork, or findings that you would like Laura to showcase, don't hesitate to contact me.

Abrazos,
Cécile

Here is the very cool 3D T-lidar scan of the canopy walkway in Wytham Woods, produced by Kim Calders of NPL/UCL:
https://youtu.be/RS6q3HMEJK8?vq=hd1080

Message from Erika Berenguer:

Our paper on the cost-effectiveness of field assessments of carbon stocks in human-modified tropical forests has just come out in Plos One:
http://journals.plos.org/plosone/article?id=10.1371/journal.pone.0133139

This is a very novel approach and, as far as we know, the first of its kind.

Please disseminate it widely,
Erika

Calling all GEM users:
I hope your year has started on a good note?
I would just like to let you know that the GEM website is likely to get a lot of hits in the next few weeks, as the first GEM Nature paper is coming out soon, with good press coverage (Congratulations, Doughty et al.!!!).
This is a good time to update your profiles, make sure you have a photo on your avatar, post latest pictures and comments: use the GEM website to promote yourself and your work! Please do not hesitate to contact me if you have any trouble logging in. Login is at the top right of your screen. Bonne chance, Cécile

Dear Gem teams, the Environmental Change Institute are experimenting with live broadcast (and downloadable videos) of some of the MSc lectures on the theme "Welcome to the Anthropocene". Lectures will start next week. We encourage you to listen in and ask questions by twitter, and particularly encourage participation from tropical countries.

The live streaming can be followed at:
http://www.eci.ox.ac.uk/news/events/2014/anthropocene/index.html

The lectures will be about 90 minutes long followed by 30 minutes of questions. The two lectures that will be streamed are:

Anthropogenic influence upon the climate: past and future prospects, Professor Myles Allen, Tuesday 14 October 9am, This lecture will be live streamed and can be watched online.

The macroecology and environmental impacts of humanity, Professor Yadvinder Malhi, Thursday 16 October 2pm, This lecture will be live streamed and can be watched online .

To watch the lectures via streaming, please visit this webpage from one hour before transmission and links will be available.

Pose your questions and comments to our audience via #ecilive.

Congratulations to the GEM team (Chris, Yadvinder & Liana) who co-authored a paper in Nature this week (cover story):

"The paper answers a long-standing question about the net carbon balance of the Amazon forest. It uses aircraft flights throughout the year at four different locations to measure the change in carbon dioxide concentration if air as it passes over the Amazon Basin. The study shows that in wet years and wet seasons the Amazon is a net sink (i.e. absorbs carbon) from the atmosphere, but in dry years and dry seasons it is carbon neutral or a source of carbon. Our main contribution in Oxford was to provide insight from our RAINFOR-GEM intensive monitoring plots across Amazonia, which suggest that the loss of the carbon sink was caused by a reduction in photosynthesis." (Y. Malhi blog, Feb 2014)

Gatti L.V., M. Gloor, J. B. Miller, C. E. Doughty, Y. Malhi, L. G. Domingues, L. S. Basso, A. Martinewski, C. S. C. Correia, V. F. Borges, S. Freitas, R. Braz, L. O. Anderson, H. Rocha, J. Grace, O. L. Phillips & J. Lloyd Drought sensitivity of Amazonian carbon balance revealed by atmospheric measurements, Nature 506, 76–80. Supplementary Info

Download the paper from here: http://is.gd/WZmcSs

R support - exporting high res. plots

Hi Guys, I have just been hitting my head against a brink wall trying to figure out he best way to export ggplot2 graphs in 600 dpi .tiff format for publication. This may be useful for many of you. The code is

ppi = 600
tiff("FIG1.tiff", width=6*ppi, height=8*ppi, res=ppi)
grid.arrange(fig_a, fig_b, fig_c, ncol=1, nrow=3)
dev.off()

This is the post that helped me get there;
http://stackoverflow.com/questions/9771619/how-to-increase-the-size-of-the-graph-while-maintaining-the-relative-scale-of-it/9771817#9771817

For all the R whizz kids out there, please respond to this comment if you have advice on how to do this.

Merci,
Cécile