ALBERT

Description: We outline the context and overall philosophy for the combined Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) Education and Public Outreach (E/PO) program, present a brief overview of all SDO E/PO programs along with more detailed highlights of a few key programs, followed by a review of our results to date, conclude a summary of the successes, failures, and lessons learned, which future missions can use as a guide, while incorporating their own content to enhance the public's knowledge and appreciation of science and technology as well as its benefit to society.

Description: The Solar Dynamics Observatory (SDO) Education and Public Outreach (E/PO) program began as a series of discrete efforts implemented by each of the instrument teams and has evolved into a well-rounded program with a full suite of national and international programs. The SDO E/PO team has put forth much effort in the past few years to increase our cohesiveness by adopting common goals and increasing the amount of overlap between our programs. In this paper, we outline the context and overall philosophy for our combined programs, present a brief overview of all SDO E/PO programs along with more detailed highlight of a few key programs, followed by a review of our results up to date. Concluding is a summary of the successes, failures, and lessons learned that future missions can use as a guide, while further incorporating their own content to enhance the public's knowledge and appreciation of NASA?s science and technology as well as its benefit to society.

Description: Tree regeneration is a key process in forest dynamics, particularly in the context of forest resilience and climate change. Models are pivotal for assessing long-term forest dynamics, and they have been in use for more than 50 years. However, an assessment of their ability to accurately represent tree regeneration is lacking. We assess how well current models capture the overall abundance, species composition, and mortality of tree regeneration. Using 15 models built to capture long-term forest dynamics at the stand, landscape, and global levels, we simulate tree regeneration at 200 sites representing large environmental gradients across Central Europe. The results are evaluated against comprehensive data from unmanaged forests. Most of the models overestimate regeneration levels, which is only compensated in some models by high simulated mortality rates in the early stages of individual trees dynamics. Simulated species diversity of regeneration matches the observed ranges. Models simulating higher species diversity at the stand level do not feature higher regeneration diversity. The effect of light availability on regeneration levels is captured better than the effect of temperature and soil moisture, but patterns are not consistent across models. Increasing complexity in the tree regeneration modules of the models is not related to higher accuracy of simulated tree regeneration. Furthermore, individual model design is more important than scale (stand, landscape, global) and approach (empirical, process-based) for accurately capturing tree regeneration. Despite considerable mismatches between simulation results and data, it is remarkable that most models capture the essential features of the highly complex process of tree regeneration, while not having been parameterized with such data. We conclude that much can be gained by evaluating and refining the modeling of regeneration processes. This has the potential to render long-term projections of forest dynamics under changing environmental conditions that are much more robust.