Many efforts to forecast ecological responses to climate change are based on air temperatures at coarse spatial (degrees) and temporal (months) resolutions. But animals experience their environment at much finer resolution, responding to changes in environmental conditions at the scale of minutes and meters. We provide computational and visualization tools that translate air temperature into usable metrics, to improve ecological forecasting related to climate change.

Some of the tools that we offer extract fine-scale microclimate conditions from coarse-scale climate data. Others translate microclimate conditions (air and surface temperatures, radiation, wind, etc.) into animal body temperatures to calculate energy balances and thermal stress.

Our goal is to build case studies of how animals are impacted by climate change to improve our approach to climate change biology education, policy, and research.

TrEnCh is open-source (GitHub organization) and built using open source software including Bootstrap, node.js, Travis CI, Express, and R.

The TrEnCh Team

Development Team

Lauren Buckley

Project lead, UW Professor

Lauren leads the TrEnCh project and has been glad to broaden her computational skills in the process.

Issac Caruso

Undergraduate researcher

Lead developer of phenology visualization.

Yutaro Sakairi

Undergraduate researcher and research scientist

Contributed to TrenchR, TrenchR tutorials, and visualizations.

Abby Meyer

Research scientist

Contributed to TrenchR, TrenchR tutorials, and visualizations.

Tony Cannistra

Graduate student

Tony has assisted with many aspects of the TrEnCh Project.

Ofir Levy

Consultant

Contributed to TrenchR.

Aji John

Research scientist

Contributed to TrenchR and visualizations.

Bryan Briones Ortiz

Undergraduate researcher and research scientist

Contributed to TrenchR, TrenchR tutorials, and visualizations.

We appreciate code and other input from Bryan Helmuth and Eric Riddell.

Guidance Team

• Joel Kingsolver, U North Carolina

  Joel has advised TrEnCh-R and is a collaborator on the butterfly and grasshopper ecological and evolutionary forecasting projects.

• Mike Kearney, U Melbourne

  Mike leads the aligned NicheMapR project and has consulted or collaborated on many project components.

• Ray Huey, U Washington

  Ray has applied his thermal ecology expertise to consult on most TrEnCh project components.