How will climate change affect forest biodiversity in North Carolina? Which tree species would be most disturbed by a drought across the Northeast U.S.? Thanks to a $1.6 million grant from the National Science Foundation, a team of Duke researchers is developing techniques that will help answer such questions.

Three Duke professors—Pankaj K. Agarwal of Computer Science, James S. Clark of the Nicholas School of the Environment, and Alan Gelfand of Statistics and Decision Sciences—will use the NSF funds to further expand their past collaboration on ecological modeling and understanding forest biodiversity.

“Existing models are limited,” says Agarwal. They do not successfully explain the wealth of biodiversity in forests, and they do not scale up well from short-term observations of small experimental plots to long-term predictions for large swaths of land. “We need a new set of tools, and we need to be able to verify that our predictions are meaningful,” he adds. To do so, the three collaborators will combine their specialties—algorithms, statistics, and environmental science—to develop a new and better modeling system that can quickly make long-term environmental predictions, a valuable and necessary tool in the face of today’s rapid climate change.