Jinyun Tang Wins Outstanding Publication Award from the Ecological Society of America
At the Ecological Society of America’s annual meeting in Sacramento, California, this month, Jinyun Tang, a project participant at Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory’s Earth Sciences Division (ESD), received honorable mention for the Gene E. Likens Junior Scientist Outstanding Publication Award. Jinyun’s award-winning paper was published last year in Biogeosciences and was co-authored by Bill Riley, also at LBNL’s ESD. In the paper, Jinyun and Bill challenge the classic, 100-year-old mathematical representation, the so-called Michaelis-Menten (or MM) kinetics, finding it unsuitable for modeling resource competition in donor-recipient networks. Instead, they propose an “equilibrium chemistry” approach to solve the problem and develop analytic “equilibrium chemistry approximation kinetics” for easy applications. Their work solves a group of similar problems that have spread within various subfields of ecology and biogeochemical modeling.
This research was supported by the Director, Office of Science, Office of Biological and Environmental Research of the U.S. Department of Energy, under contract no. DE-AC02-05CH11231, as part of their Regional and Global Climate Modeling Program; and by the Next-Generation Ecosystem Experiments (NGEE Arctic) project, supported by the Office of Biological and Environmental Research in the DOE Office of Science under contract no. DE-AC02-05CH11231.