Author: richardson-lab

During the first weekend of November, Jacob travelled to Washington to attend the 18th annual Graduate Climate Conference. Hosted at the University of Washington’s Pack Forest in the foothills of Mount Rainier, the Conference was organized by graduate students for graduate students to discuss ongoing research related to Earth’s climate system. Presentation topics ranged from atmospheric river patterns over the western U.S. to food security in the Arctic to the global vegetation response to rising vapor pressure deficit. The purpose of the Conference is for students studying climate-related topics to learn from each other and create interdisciplinary research collaborations.

Jacob gave a talk on the research he’s conducting at the Sevilleta LTER Mean-Variance Experiment to better understand how desert vegetation will respond to a drier and more variable climate across the southwest U.S. His talk was titled The Future Carbon Sequestration Potential of Chihuahuan Desert Ecosystems. Following the Conference, he spent a day playing tourist in Seattle with fellow attendees.

In late October, Oscar and visiting student Francisco made a trip down to the Cedar Mesa AmeriFlux site in southeastern Utah. They installed a number of new instruments at the site that will contribute to Oscar’s research on the seasonality of pinyon-juniper woodlands. These included thermistors within the stems of six trees (also instrumented with Tomst dendrometers and East 30 sap flow sensors), an Apogee infrared radiometer, and two Skye 4-channel light sensors for measuring spectral reflectance across a total of 8 visible and near-infrared wavebands. 

Francisco later commented, “I enjoyed seeing how the setup at Cedar Mesa combines different instruments to monitor how trees in the pinyon-juniper woodland respond to their environment. Learning how these tools come together to monitor ecosystem health and resilience was inspiring”. 

Apart from the science activities, Francisco also got to experience a number of  landscapes and landmarks of the Southwest during the trip, including Comb Ridge, the Moki Dugway, and iconic Monument Valley. Sounds like a great time! 

This week for the ever-popular Ecoinformatics Seminar Series, we had an in-person visit from Dr. Renée Brown from the University of New Mexico’s Department of Biology. Renée is also involved with the National Science Foundation’s McMurdo Dry Valleys Long-Term Ecological Research Program. Renée’s talk gave an overview of her research on the effects of global change on dryland ecosystems ranging from the Chihuahuan Desert to Antarctica (which is, in fact, the world’s largest desert). She also discussed her career trajectory and provided insights into the importance of sensor networks for studying ecological processes across spatial and temporal scales.

Aside from her seminar talk, many folks in the lab and across ECOSS met with Renée over the course of her visit to chat about science and life. Her visit concluded with a lively happy hour on Monday evening, and a snowy stroll through the aspens before she headed home on Tuesday afternoon. Thank you, Renée, for the wonderful visit!

Darby, Oscar, and Mostafa led two well-attended PhenoCam training workshops as part of the AmeriFlux Management Project webinar series, engaging over 50 participants. In the first session, held on October 11, Oscar and Mostafa provided an introduction to the PhenoCam Network and guided participants on how to navigate the PhenoCam website. The second session, on October 18, featured Darby leading an interactive data activity on a cloud platform, demonstrating how to integrate PhenoCam data with eddy covariance flux tower data. The resources from both sessions are available here. Also, the recordings are available here: Part 1 and Part 2.

After the workshop, Darby reported: “This was the best turnout we’ve had yet for a training sessions, and we had a lot of great questions from the audience, particularly about how researchers can apply these tools to data from their own sites.”

Mostafa’s paper, “Scaling Individual Tree Transpiration With Thermal Cameras Reveals Interspecies Differences to Drought Vulnerability,” was published this week in the AGU journal, Geophysical Research Letters (GRL). Using canopy temperature data from thermal cameras, Mostafa estimated the transpiration rates of individual trees at Harvard Forest and Niwot Ridge with the PT-JPL model. Tree-level analysis revealed species-specific responses to drought, with lodgepole pine exhibiting greater tolerance than Engelmann spruce at Niwot and red oak showing greater tolerance than red maple at Harvard. These findings show how ecophysiological differences between species result in varying responses to drought and demonstrate that these responses can be characterized by deriving transpiration from crown temperature measurements.

Great work, Mostafa!

The Annual AISES (American Indian Science and Engineering Society) National Conference is a unique, three-day event focusing on educational, professional, and workforce development for Indigenous peoples of North America and the Pacific Islands in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) studies and careers.  Kai and other members of NAU’s AISES chapter recently traveled to San Antonio for the 2024 conference. Kai presented a poster on how the lab is using PhenoCams to track responses to precipitation manipulation treatments at the SEV MVE (Mean X Variance Experiment). After the conference, Kai reported that “it was a great experience and I’m happy to have made new connections in academia!”

Congratulations, Kai!

Oscar has been awarded a NSERC (Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of Canada) Postgraduate Scholarship by the Government of Canada. The title of his funded proposal is “Tracking the seasonality of photosynthesis in a widespread arid conifer woodland using canopy colour,” and careful readers will note his Canadian spelling of the final word.

Oscar’s NSERC fellowship, the Canadian equivalent of the highly-competitive NSF GRFP for U.S. citizens, will provide support for the next 3 years as he conducts research on growing season length and timing in pinyon-juniper ecosystems using field measurements in Arizona and Utah, in addition to PhenoCam data from a number of sites across the Southwest. 

Congratulations to Oscar on being selected for this great honor!

The photograph on the left shows Oscar dodging the paparazzi (or, more accurately, hiding behind a juniper) after his award was publicly announced last week, and the photograph on the right shows Oscar in the field at the Bradshaw Ranch SEGA site near Sedona (a location commonly described as a “paranormal hotspot”; EMF-detecting gear not shown to protect the integrity of the researcher).

Last week at the FoS, an intrepid group of Flagstaff residents learned about virtual travel in time and space as they explored the rhythm of the seasons across the PhenoCam network archive. In an introductory presentation, Oscar and Mostafa explained the science of PhenoCam, and why phenology is an important indicator of the biological impacts of climate change. Then, after a tour of the PhenoCam web page, during which they learned some handy tricks for drilling down to specific sites and images, participants worked on a couple of hands-on activities centered around sites in some of their favorite locations. Oscar noted that “Although the NAU high-performance computer is named Monsoon, the run-away winner in the workshop’s ‘name your favorite season’ survey was actually autumn!” After the event, Andrew commented that “this was a great opportunity to share, in a way that is accessible to people of all ages, some of the really cool science happening in our lab.”

Great job, Oscar and Mostafa!

Every year, the Flagstaff Festival of Science allows NAU students, researchers, and faculty to share with the Flagstaff community some of the exciting and cutting-edge STEM research being conducted in the labs at NAU. In a STEM poster session in Ashurst Hall, Kai presented a poster on the work that he is conducting as part of his CCC2NAU “Pathway to the Skies” internship. In a cross-department between members of Christopher Edwards’ PIXEL lab in Astronomy and Planetary Sciences, and the Richardson Lab, Kai is working as part of a team putting together a “next generation” phenocam that would include three different camera systems, one for each of the visible (RGB), near-infrared, and thermal bands. In his poster, Kai explained the overall project goals and objectives, including some of the design challenges, and described his work in engineering and 3D printing a mount to securely hold all three camera sensors in precise alignment. Great job, Kai!

an·​a·​lem·​ma ˌa-nə-ˈle-mə: a plot or graph in the shape of a figure eight that shows the position of the sun in the sky at a given time of day (such as noon) at one specific locale measured throughout the year.

Supported by an L.L. Stewart Fellowship through the Patricia Valian Reser Center for the Creative Arts, video artist Julia Oldham is visiting long-term collaborator Dr. Christopher Still as an artist-in-residence at Oregon State University. Julia has been exploring how she might incorporate PhenoCam imagery in her art, and how the image time series might be used to generate soundscapes as well. After meeting another long-term collaborator, Dr. David Bowling (University of Utah), at the recent AmeriFlux meeting, Julia combed the PhenoCam image archive to find sites with with just the right shadow geometry so that the analemma would be traced out on the ground. Using imagery from the SEGA Arboretum Meadow site, Julia developed the video below. “There are so many beautiful PhenoCam sites — what an amazing resource for seeing place and time and transformation,” Julia wrote.

Just another example of the irresistible intersection of science and art!