The Farquhar model is one of the most important model's in our field. With some impressive insight from a collaborative team of complementary scientists, the model forms an elegant backbone to the study of the carbon cycle. Read the Farquhar et al 1980 Paper and use the 'Discussion' as a guide for your reading.
This year we are really excited to have Belinda Medlyn come to the course for week 1. She'll be talking about several different issues but one that's sure to come up is how we devise experiments and modelling efforts to be complementary.
It's incredibly useful to be able to remotely sense vegetation on the Earth. However many scientists don't understand the limitations of this technique. Tristan Quaife will get into this issue in week two. The paper led by Faith Ann Heinsch has a host of co-authors from a wide range of different fields. Read the paper and see if you can answer the questions posed in the discussion.
A few years ago we used the second week of the course as a template for this paper - it's a gentle introduction to data assimilation using MCMC. There are links to code you can download yourself via John's webpage: http://web.augsburg.edu/~zobitz/dataAssimilation.html
In week two Dave Schimel will come by to give his 'chalk talk' it's rarely the same twice but one of the key papers Dave will talk about is Tans, Fung & Takahashi 1990 from Science. It's a short paper but it's dense. The first time I read it, I needed to read it 4 times to understand it. Take a look at the paper and the disucssion questions. This will set you up for Dave's talk and it's a great overview for the theme of the course.
A very quick and basic introduction to using basic MATLAB functions (command line mathematical functions, importing data, plotting data)