Update & solicitation for new paper ideas

I have 3 reviewers approved for the book chapter. Craig Allen is considering, still waiting for a response from Dave Pyke. Jeff Herrick and Brandon Bestelmeyer have bowed out as potential co-authors, but I did get a couple ideas form Brandon, who said positive things about the MS.

So...I'll keep that moving.

In the mean time, I'd like to figure out what is next. I've mostly had my fill for right now of the survey stuff. I'd like to work on some actual datasets pretty soon.

First here's a list of potential products, or partly done thingies I've been thinking about
1) Detailed MS on 2 Wupatki ecosites, or Wupatki plus some other Southern Network sites. I have found that there is some data from Kathryn Thomas/Monica McTeague which at least would be useful for validating state and phase concepts for the 2 Wupatki ecosites and the Petrified Forest ecosites. My motivation is that alot of detail was cut for the chapter, here we could present a few data-poor cases.

what I have is a good complete model for LImy Uplands, A draft model for sandstone uplands (not informed by any surveys), and nothing whatsoever for Petrified Forest. The data sets are the I&M plots (10 each for each ecosite), and the McTeague-Thomas veg releves which are of limited usefulness.

It's hard to imagine this going to a fancy journal, and to complete it I'd have to do the survey process again. I may want to look into putting questionaires on a website again. So this is back burner, but would be nice to get the most of the detail that came out of the survey process.

2) Multiple STMs integrated across climatic gradients. SD Sandy Loam, D Sandy Loam, and Upland (Sandy?) Loam form the canyonlands dataset are not really
discrete, rather they exist along a gradient which is subject to change. I
don't know what this would look like, but there could be models for each,
and then a meta-model which allows reasonable transitions among them under
climate change scenarios. We can build the paper around the idea that STMs
derived only from past observations aren't good enough if global change is
altering everything. Perhaps the submodels will be constructed based upon
our apriori ideas and verified to the degree possible using Mark's dataset.
And perhaps we could try the expert survey thing to help us fill in
transition probabilities (at least ordinal ones) form sub-model to
sub-model.

This one sounds pretty viable, maybe we could even send it to Global Change
Biology, it would be very different from what they normally publish which
could work to our advantage.

3) A comprehensive treatment of the main forage-producing ecosites in the
CANY and surrounding region. I see the logic of grouping SD Sand, and
multiple soil types within SD Sandy Loam. it seems like a Journal of Arid
Environments paper right out of the gate (nothing wrong with ending there,
but would be nice to take a crack at Ecosystems or something like that). I
wonder what our novel contribution could be, to make it interesting enough
for a more widely-read journal? We could try to develop those path
analysis-logistic regression hybrid models for threshold
estimation...that's one idea (have found some dissing of logistic models
for threshold estimation in the lit, so piecewise regression might actually
be a better basis for such a method). We could develop models for SD Sand,
SD Sandy Loam Begay, and SD Sandy Loam other soils, then develop a model
averaging procedure based upon soil texture for any reasonably similar
ecosite.

I did work up Desert Sand and analogs (on the blog). But it's not a good
enough analysis to be stand alone I think. I did the best possible with
available data...but I see alot of potential criticisms. So this ecosite
could be folded in too.

What do you guys think...where should I go next?