During exam week, Oscar and Andrew joined Cara and Mariah on a field trip to the Mogollon Rim Ranger District of Coconino National Forest. The team was in search of a small ponderosa pine that would provide material for a 14C cellulose standard for some of Cara’s thesis work, and at the same time give Cara her first Christmas tree. With her permit in one hand, and chainsaw in the other, Cara declared the event a success.
It was a lovely day in the woods, and the hike to the top of a small cinder cone provided great views in all directions. Kivi the Wonder Dog enjoyed the outing, too.
Congratulations to Jen on successful PhD defense! On National Stuffing Day (November 21, who knew?), Jen presented her dissertation work on thermal imaging of plant canopies to a large on-campus audience and even larger (and global) virtual audience on Zoom. The event was a “big Diehl” for Jen’s family, as nine Diehls made the long trip to Flagstaff to hear about Jen’s research on this hot topic. Thanks to Jen’s mom and dad for providing some tales from the Diehl family lore (including classics such as “Jen’s Canadian Moose Encounter” and “Jen’s First Day of High School”) that Andrew was able to share with the audience. Later that day, there was a celebration at Mother Road, where lots of Red Bull was consumed.
Jen will officially become Dr. Diehl at graduation on December 12, at which time she will also be awarded the Outstanding Graduate Student award in SICCS. Good luck with all your future endeavors, Jen!
The photo on the left shows Jen in the hot seat, presenting her work, and the picture on the right shows Jen with committee members Andrew, George Koch, and Chris Doughty at the after-party. External committee member Chris Still, at Oregon State, was unable to attend the defense (or celebration) in person, which meant that he missed out on donuts and Red Bull.
As part of the Flagstaff Festival of Science’s In-School Speaker Program, Perry, Jacob, Oscar, and Darby visited six 6th-grade classrooms at Northland Preparatory Academy in early November. They led hands-on lessons about how PhenoCams are used to track vegetation changes across different ecosystems. Throughout each hour-long session, students remained engaged as they worked with real PhenoCam images. They sorted photos into seasonal sequences based on visual cues from various ecosystems, identified types of environmental disturbances captured by the cameras, and even explored a PhenoCam site independently to determine when the vegetation in that ecosystem was at its greenest and when it was least green. The students also learned how to use metadata from the cameras, such as temperature and time of year, to inform their decisions when arranging the images into the correct seasons. One particularly thought-provoking moment came when they were asked why it’s important to have cameras capturing repeated images from the same location over time. Many correctly concluded that this setup is essential for monitoring long-term changes in vegetation greenness driven by environmental changes, showing a good understanding of the scientific process behind PhenoCam research. By the end of the day, the lesson led to an exciting conversation between students and their teacher about how they might incorporate the PhenoCam into their current unit on ecology.
In late October, members of the lab traveled 4 hours south to Tucson, where the 2025 AmeriFlux meeting was being held at the University of Arizona. Oscar presented his work on near-surface remote sensing in pinyon-juniper woodlands; Yujie presented her analysis of the continuity between paired NEON and AmeriFlux sites, and Andrew gave an update from the AmeriFlux Science Steering Committee and the PhenoCam Network. The meeting included a field trip to the amazing Arizona – Sonora Desert Museum, as well as a delicious conference dinner, and many stimulating talks and posters. It was a great opportunity to catch up with colleagues from across the US, and the Americas more generally.
The pictures below include the standard workshop photo, as well as snapshots from the tours to collaborator Russ Scott’s Santa Rita sites, and the U of A Laboratory of Tree Ring Research. Local host Dave Moore did a fantastic job of keeping meeting participants entertained and well fed (for some, karaoke after the first night’s dinner was a highlight).
The in-person facilitated summit brought together NEON staff, NEON Ambassadors (including Yujie), and researchers from across the country. Participants gathered to explore innovative and interdisciplinary ways to use NEON data, samples, and infrastructure to advance continental-scale biology.
A key outcome of the summit was the formation of enthusiastic and motivated working groups, who will collaborate on impactful outputs including writing proposals and white papers, and developing new resources for the community.
The photo shows Yujie on a pre-workshop field trip to the Central Plains Experimental Range (CPER) NEON site, 75 km to the northeast of Boulder.
Already in Arizona to visit colleagues in Tucson, Brazilian forest engineer Izabela Aleixo, newly hired as a researcher at the National Institute for Amazonian Research (INPA), traveled to Flagstaff in early October. She presented her research in a seminar titled “Tropical Forests and Environmental Change: Insights from Long-Term Phenology and Large-Scale Experiments in the Central Amazon.” Izabela’s work focuses on tree phenology, mortality, and forest dynamics in relation to climate change, and recently she is participating in several large-scale experiments. In her talk, Izabela showed exciting preliminary data from the AmazonFACE experiment. These results provide early evidence of the potential effects of elevated CO₂ on plant physiology and forest functioning. The full-scale experiment is still being installed.
During her brief visit, Izabela had dinner with students at Delhi Palace, enjoyed a happy hour at Mother Road, saw the impressively shiny MICADAS AMS for radiocarbon analysis, and visited Sunset Crater.
Hard to believe, but it’s been 20 years since a webcam was first put atop the Bartlett Experimental Forest AmeriFlux tower! The pictures from the Axis 211 weren’t great (the first recorded image, just before noon on October 4 2005 is shown below), but they were good enough. The data led to a 2007 paper in Oecologia that concluded “A network of cameras could offer a novel opportunity to implement a regional or national phenology monitoring program.” It turns out, that was a pretty good idea! This review paper in Agricultural and Forest Meteorology provides a more complete history of the PhenoCam network.
This week, core members of the PhenoCam team met up at Dark Sky Brewing to celebrate the recent acceptance in Earth System Science Data of the paper documenting V3 of the PhenoCam dataset. The dataset covers through the end of 2023 and contains almost 5000 site years of data. The data curation team did a super job vetting the phenological time series for each PhenoCam site included in the paper, but ultimately it was Keith’s wizardry with server and filesystem management, ability to dig in and resolve obscure edge-cases and bugs, and tenacity when it came to delivering approximately 40 TB of data and imagery to the ORNL DAAC, that was essential to the successful completion of this effort. For his invaluable contributions to the PhenoCam V3.0 dataset, Keith was awarded the coveted Golden PhenoCam. Thank you for all your efforts, Keith.
Congratulations to Jen, who was selected as an Outstanding Graduate Student in the Steve Sanghi College of Engineering (SCE) for Fall 2025. SCE Dean Charles Chadwell summarized Jen’s exceptional accomplishments: “You were awarded the highly selective NASA FINESST fellowship to support your work, and you independently secured approximately $35,000 in funding to organize and lead an international workshop at Hat Ranch, bringing together 40 participants from 10 countries. The outcomes of this workshop were featured in AGU’s EOS news magazine, underscoring the impact of your efforts. Your scholarly contributions are already impressive, with your first paper published in Environmental Research Letters and a coauthored article in PNAS. You have also shared your research widely through oral presentations at venues such as the Flagstaff Gravity Lab, the 2024 AmeriFlux Meeting at UC Berkeley, Universidad de Sonora, the AGU Fall Meeting in Washington, DC, and the University of Plymouth in the UK. Your ability to secure funding, publish in top journals, and present internationally highlights your leadership, initiative, and the global relevance of your work.”
With the end of September marking the end of the water year, it’s a good time to look back on this year’s summer rainfall, and compare it to previous years. While the summer monsoon season “officially” runs from June 15 to September 30, it’s not like rain in May and early June doesn’t matter. So, the graph above compares cumulative precipitation over the period from May 1 to late October. And, although well into August it looked like 2025 might be a total dud, or what some call a “non-soon,” abundant rainfall over the last six weeks turned things around. As measured by a Campbell Scientific ClimaVue all-in-one weather station located in the Forestdale neighborhood of southeast Flagstaff, the official precipitation total from May 1 to today (October 1) is a very respectable 197.4 mm, or 7.8″. Compared to the previous 5 y, it’s almost three times as much as the ultra-dry summer of 2020, but about 40% less than the epically-wet summer of 2021.
Fun fact: The final September rain in Flagstaff brought the first autumn snow to the highest summits of the San Francisco peaks, although it melted away by mid-day.
