Kat Taylor, who was a 2021 participant in the DAPS REU program, graduated from Penn State this spring and while on a cross-country road trip stopped in Flagstaff to say hello. Kat had worked on greenhouse gas fluxes from biocrusts in an interdisciplinary project that included Andrew, Mariah, Matt Bowker (Forestry/Ecoss), George Koch (Bio/Ecoss), Mark Salvatore (DAPS), and David Trilling (DAPS) as mentors. During her visit, Kat said that the REU program had been “literally life-changing” for her. Good luck in all your future endeavors, Kat!
Debjani Sihi, assistant professor at Emory University (soon to be moving to NC State), visited the NAU and gave the last ecoinformatics seminar of the semester, “Modeling and mapping of soil organic carbon across scales.” Her work on both process-based modeling of soil respiration, and machine-learning-driven geospatial mapping of soil carbon stocks, was highly relevant to many students and faculty attending her talk.
Debjani was a postdoc (2015-2017) with long-time Howland Forest (Maine) co-PI Eric Davidson, and in connection with that work had previously visited Andrew’s lab at Harvard on several occasions. Her visit to NAU provided a great opportunity to dust off some vintage photos of the Howland Forest team from the days when they had regular team meetings at the Bartlett Experimental Forest in New Hampshire.
Howland Team 2016. From left: Andrew, Aaron Teets (NAU PhD 2022), Holly Huges, Kathleen Savage, Debjani, Shawn Fraser, Dave Hollinger, John Lee.
Howland Team 2008: Bryan Dail, Neal Scott, Holly Huges, Eric Davidson, Kathleen Savage, John Lee, Bob Evans, Andrew, Chuck Rodriguez, Dave Hollinger.
At the end of the semester, lab members again participated in a new professional development workshop, “Principles of Inclusion,” offered by NAU’s Center for Inclusive Excellence and Access in collaboration with the Department of Human Resources. Our goal in taking these training activities is to make active, intentional, and ongoing engagement with diversity a core component of our lab culture, thereby creating an environment where everyone can thrive and succeed.
Thanks to Justin Mallett and Lee Griffin for another great session! We look forward to more workshops with you next fall!
Congratulations to DendoDawgs capstone team members Zack Derrick, Asa Henry, Niklas Kariniemi, and Nile Roth for their great final presentation in the NAU Undergraduate Symposium. They shared their work on an Android app to read and manage data collected by Tomst dendrometers and soil moisture sensors.
Members of the lab gathered on the back patio at Cornish Pasty Co. for an end-of-semester lab lunch earlier this week. The chicken tikka masala pasty was particularly popular and received high marks all around. Thanks to Jacob and Jen for organizing a fun group outing!
Mostafa, Darby, and Oscar led a PhenoCam training workshop for the NAU community, in which they: covered the basics of what a PhenoCam is and what the PhenoCam Network is; showed participants how to explore the image archive through the PhenoCam website; and introduced various open-source tools to access imagery and derived data products. Later in the summer, the team will be offering a similar workshop at the annual ESA meeting in Long Beach, California. Great job, PhenoCam Training team!
This week’s ecoinformatics speaker was Nancy Kiang, a scientist at the NASA Goddard Institute for Space Sciences. During a whirlwind visit, Nancy gave back-to-back presentations — her ecoinformatics seminar, titled “Geometric optical radiative transfer as the link between remote sensing, plant canopy form and function for Earth System Models“, and the Department of Astronomy & Planetary Science (DAPS) colloquium, titled “System science for sparse exoplanet statistics: Habitability metrics from a ROCKE-3D perturbed parameter ensemble“; she also met with students and faculty, experienced some of Flagstaff’s finer culinary treats, saw the ACE Lab MICADAS, visited the Lowell Observatory, and toured the pueblos at Wupatki National Monument and the volcanic landscape at Sunset Crater National Monument. Thanks to SICCS and DAPS for co-sponsoring the visit.
In April, Mostafa attended the PhenoFeedbacks workshop in Dresden, Germany. The workshop centered on the impacts and feedback of phenological changes in the Earth system. During the event, Mostafa and colleagues from Germany, Italy, Belgium, Australia, and the USA collaborated on a plan for a review paper about phenological changes and feedbacks.
Lin Meng, an assistant professor in Earth and Environmental Sciences at Vanderbilt University, visited the lab this week and presented her high-profile work on urban influences on tree phenology in the Ecoinformatics Seminar. She met with many students and faculty during her visit, and also visited Walnut Canyon National Monument with SICCS student Huilin Sun and lab postdoc Yujie Liu. Lin had previously invited Andrew to do a talk a Iowa State in 2019, which led to many productive collaborations.
The photo shows Andrew and Lin en route to a post-seminar lunch – thanks for your visit, Lin!
Second-year PhD student Oscar Zimmerman was recently awarded research funding through the NAU Support for Graduate Students (SGS) program, which is administered by NAU’s Office of the Vice President for Research (OVPR). The title of Oscar’s proposal is “Tracking the seasonality of woodland conifer trees using remote sensing,” and he will be conducting this work in piñon-juniper woodlands in the Southwest, including at the Cedar Mesa AmeriFlux site in southeastern Utah (a PhenoCam image from the site is shown below). Congratulations, Oscar!
