Author: richardson-lab

Fall has begun, which means the Flagstaff Festival of Science is here! Darby and Jacob helped kick off the annual Festival with an outreach event downtown, Snook’s Science in the Park. They brought out Poppy, one of our Flux Puppy carbon dioxide analyzer systems, to teach the Flagstaff community about some of the science we do. Booth attendees hypothesized which Mason jar would have the greatest carbon dioxide efflux, the one with compost and rollie pollies or the one with roots, water, and duckweed. Folks, including many kiddos, used their knowledge of respiration and photosynthesis to form great hypotheses! One of the special things about Flagstaff is how STEM-oriented its citizens are, and Science in the Park is a spectacular demonstration of this. They also learned about human physiology by blowing into the Flux Puppy to see what the concentration of carbon dioxide was in their breath, and challenging others for the highest concentration of the day. The winner blew 240,000 ppm after sprinting around the park and holding their breath!

Congratulations to Darby and Jacob on a super-successful outreach event!

In early September, Jen attended the annual AmeriFlux Annual Meeting, which was held on San Francisco Bay at the Berkeley Marina. Many friends, collaborators, and former lab group members were in attendance and it was a great networking opportunity. Jen gave an oral presentation titled “The Great Thermal Bake–Off: A Hands-On Workshop for Enhancing Temperature Measurement Precision and Standardization for Improved Flux Interpretation and Application”, which provided an overview of the outcomes of the workshop which was hosted by NAU at the Historic Hat Ranch in August of this year. (Side note: Jen was awarded the prize for the longest talk title!). On returning home from the meeting, Jen wrote: “the Ameriflux meeting was so awesome! There were over 100 folks there and a really welcoming community. I was able to chat and make connections with lots of folks. “

The first photo shows Jen (front right) along with fellow SICCS T3 PhD student Emma Reich (front left), former lab visitor (2023) Deklan Mengering (back left; now UC Davis), and former lab REU student (2010) and postdoc (2019-2021) Adam Young (now Battelle/NEON) at the AmeriFlux site US-EDN: Eden Landing Ecological Reserve. The second photo shows conference participants in front of the Berkeley Marina.

Congratulations to Perry Giambuzzi, who passed his comprehensive exam today after an excellent oral presentation followed by multiple rounds of challenging questions from Andrew, his chair, and committee members Chris Doughty (SICCS), Paul Stoy (U Wisconsin – Madison), and Mark Friedl (Boston U). Questions covered topics related to phenology, remote sensing, and CO2 flux measurements, and included a real zinger on the ultimate fate of a photon (thank you, Professor Doughty).

Great job, Perry!

Congratulations to Mostafa on the publication of his paper, “Canopy temperature dynamics are closely aligned with ecosystem water availability across a water- to energy-limited gradient”, in Agricultural and Forest Meteorology. Synthesizing data from three different sites, each instrumented for eddy covariance measurements and canopy thermal imaging, Mostafa’s paper highlight the importance of considering water and energy limitations when studying canopy temperature dynamics in different ecosystems.

Organized by Jen, Mostafa, and Ben Wiebe, and with funding from FLUXNET, AmeriFlux, NAU’s T3 Program in Ecoinformatics, the College of the Environment, Forestry, and Natural Sciences, the Department of Astronomy and Planetary Science, the School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems, the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society, and Campbell Scientific, the Great Thermal Bake-off was a smashing success.

From August 13th to 16th, 40 scientists from over 10 countries gathered at NAU’s Historic Hat Ranch property, just west of Williams, AZ, to discuss advancing the application and standardization of near-surface Thermal Infrared (TIR) remote sensing in ecological research. The workshop included participants from various career stages, with half identifying as early-career researchers, fostering a diverse and collaborative environment.

The main objectives of the workshop were to Enhance Cross-Disciplinary Collaboration an to Promote Standardization and Accessibility, and a key outcome was quantitative data from a series of experiments to characterize the uncertainty in canopy temperature measurements made under real-world conditions.

Congratulations to the organizers on a fantastic event!

For more information, read the blog post at Fluxnet.org.

Jen was recently out at Hat Ranch, setting up instruments in preparation for The Great Thermal Bake off in mid-August. Although it can be hard to find good help these days, Jen reported that her field technicians were very enthusiastic — keen to lend a hand (or hoof?) and generally get in the way, especially this dun-colored sweetie.

Darby and Oscar road-tripped to Long Beach, CA, for the Ecological Society of America’s annual meeting, where they gave a PhenoCam training workshop, “Introduction to the PhenoCam Network”, in early August. The workshop was attended by 23 conference-goers eager to learn more about PhenoCam. Darby and Oscar answered many questions about the potential uses of PhenoCam data, and described plans to adopt the StarDot Live2 camera as the next-generation PhenoCam standard. Participants explored the web page and chose a favorite site, and after being introduced to some of the R packages designed for interacting with PhenoCam data they they plotted up Gcc curves for that site. They then pulled midday images for one day each month to provide context for these numerical data. At the end of the session, attendees uploaded a show-and-tell slide and presented their analysis to the group. Thanks Darby and Oscar for running a highly successful session, and thanks to Mostafa for helping to develop the training materials!

p.s. Check out the snazzy “Richardson Lab” shirt that Oscar is sporting…

In early August, Andrew and George Koch made a quick trip to Santa Lucia Preserve, near Carmel-by-the-Sea, California, for some site maintenance and datalogger code updates. Of the six second-growth Sequoia sempervirens trees they have instrumented over three trips this summer, all trees are instrumented with five Tomst dendrometers, three Meter leaf wetness sensors, and one Florapulse microtensiometer for continuous measurements of stem water potential. Half the trees are equipped with Campbell temp/RH probes and half the trees with the IRSystem MiniBSV 10k Visibility Sensor for fog detection. All sensors are connected to a Campbell CR310 datalogger in each tree. Because logger channels were in short supply, the MiniBSV sensors communicate using the Tekbox TBS06-TS SDI-RS232 converter, connected to the logger’s DB9 serial port. Each tree’s measurement and logging system is solar powered, with Crydom D1D12 solid state relays being used to moderate power consumption. The logger in each tree communicates with the “Brain Box” in Tree 1 via Ubiquiti NanoStation P2P radios; the Brain Box is also equipped with a StarDot PhenoCam, and a SierraWireless RV50x cell modem/router for two-way communications between all trees and the outside world. What a cool project to be doing more than 60 m above the ground!

The photo shows Andrew in the top of Tree 6. The base of this tree is occupied by a giant wood rat nest, and hence this particular tree has now become known as Wood Rat City (sung to the tune of a Guns N’ Roses classic).

Natasha drove out to the Sevilleta NWR in central New Mexico at the end of July. She and Jacob installed a network of Eosense FD, or “Forced Diffusion”, sensors to continuously measure the CO₂ efflux from the soil. They instrumented a total of six plots within the Plains Grassland ecosystem type of the Sevilleta Mean-Variance Experiment. The data these sensors collect will help us understand how changes in amount and variability of precipitation inputs affect carbon cycling in the soil, complementing the data we are already collecting on-site with 72 phenocams across four different ecosystem types (Desert Shrubland, Desert Grassland, Plains Grassland, and Piñon–Juniper Woodland). Great job, Natasha and Jacob!

Elis Brown, our 2024 Sevilleta National Science Foundation Research Experiences for Undergraduates intern, successfully and fabulously presented the research they conducted with Jacob this summer. The poster symposium took place on Thursday, August 1st at the Sevilleta Field Station south of Albuquerque, NM. Refreshments were had and exciting science was discussed. Elis’s poster was titled “Soil Respiration Responses to Altered Precipitation in a Creosote Shrubland.” Elis collected data using a Flux Puppy system at the Mean-Variance Experiment creosote site to investigate how reduced and more variable precipitation will influence soil respiration rates in bare soil and near creosotes. Ellis will be starting their junior year at NAU in just a few weeks. Way to go, Elis, and thanks to Jacob for serving as their mentor!