In the final week of August the LEMONTREE Project hosted it’s first summer school. A number of the SPECIAL team attended the summer school in Utrecht, the Netherlands, including Olivia Haas, Dominic Robson, Wenyao Gan, Yicheng Shen and Sophia Cain.
The summer school included was uniquely to be taught by the early career researchers (ECRs); to share research methods they have mastered over the years, and to learn new skills from other ECRs within the LEMONTREE project.
The inaugural summer school addressed three topics key to the LEMONTREE philosophy; this included optimality theory, running the P-model and field based measurements of gas exchange. On day one the ECRs first learnt about optimality theory in more detail, with the addition of learning how optimality theory applied to soil moisture models and stem respiration as case studies. Day two of the summer school was a hands on learning experience regarding how to run the P-model in both R (Rsofun) and in Python (Pyrealm). Finally, the training experience concluded with a day spent at the botanic gardens taking Li-COR measurements.
Figure 1: ECRs learning how to take Li-COR measurements at the Botanic Gardens, Utrecht.
Overall, the summer school was not only an excellent learning development program for the ECRs but allowed for the establishment of core research networks between the PhD students and Postdocs as they move forward in their careers.
For more information on the summer school, along with accounts from the ECRs themselves, you can read the official summer school blog post on the LEMONTREE website.