Author: richardson-lab

In early January, Natasha and Jacob traveled to Albuquerque to participate in the annual SEV LTER “All Hands” meeting. The two-day meeting featured a workshop to foster two-way conversations between regional land managers and SEV LTER researchers about land management challenges and information needs, and a symposium which featured presentations on current research at SEV. Natasha presented her soil respiration modeling in the symposium.

The photo shows Natasha, LTER PI Jenn Rudgers (University of New Mexico) and Jacob out on the town.

In August 2020, the CZU Lightning Complex fire burned through Big Basin Redwoods Sate Park near Santa Cruz, CA. Supported by NSF RAPID funding, as well as Save the Redwoods League, Andrew, Mariah, George Koch, Melissa Enright, and Drew Peltier have been studying the resprouting of trees following that massive disturbance, and measuring the age of remobilized carbon used to support resprouting using the MICADAS (MIni CArbon DAting System) in the ACE Lab here at NAU. With Drew as first author, our paper on this project, “Old reserves and ancient buds fuel regrowth of coast redwood after catastrophic fire,” has just been published in Nature Plants. Press releases from NAU and Save the Redwoods League both do a nice job explaining the story in a non-technical and accessible manner. There is also a great summary published by Science News. Don’t forget to check out the santracruz2 phenocam, which is tracking the recovery! And remember, the documentary produced by NAU-TV, Redwood Survival, will always be streaming on YouTube.

Andrew is co-PI on a funded grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Institute of Food and Agriculture, “Ecological and Social Science Training and Education at the Intersection of Forests, Fires and Floods in a Changing Climate (ESSTE),” on which close collaborator George Koch is lead PI. The project will help prepare NAU students to address climate change in western forest ecosystems. For more information, see the NAU News article.

Natasha had the opportunity to participate in a workshop focused on phenological monitoring in the dry tropics, which was held at the Ongava Research Centre in Namibia. The workshop was organized as part of the PhenoChange project, coordinated by Kyle Dexter of the University of Edinburgh. Natasha met colleagues from around the world, presented the lab’s own work with the PhenoCam Network and applications to modeling ecosystem processes, assisted with field work, and even went on a few Safari drives!

Sophie Fauset, from the University of Plymouth, and her student William Brown, visited the lab for a week in early November. Sophie is PI of the netCTF, or Network for Monitoring Canopy Temperature of Forests, a project funded by the U.K.’s Natural Environment Research Council in 2020. Sophie and William presented their work at the BiFOR (Birmingham Institute of Forest Research) FACE (Free Air CO₂ Enrichment) facility in the UK and at the Forestry Research Institute of Ghana in a mini-symposium on canopy temperature that was organized by Jen. Jen, Mostafa, Sophie, and William also worked together on camera calibration and image processing protocols, including head-to-head field testing of thermal cameras manufactured by FLUKE and FLIR.

Mariah’s paper, “Interannual precipitation controls on soil CO₂ fluxes in high elevation conifer and aspen forests,” has been published in Environmental Research Letters. This work is the result of a dozen years of field measurements (with some help from Andrew) at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado. The analysis shows that soil CO₂ fluxes are sensitive to rainfall in the current growing season, as well as snowfall in the previous winter. Our newly-funded DOE project, leveraging the Snodgrass mountain transect, will build on these results.

Andrew’s review paper, “PhenoCam: An evolving, open-source tool to study the temporal and spatial variability of ecosystem-scale phenology,” which was solicited for the 60th anniversary Special Issue of Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, has now been published online. The review describes (1) the changing phenological research landscape, as represented by phenology-themed papers in AFM, over the last 60 y; (2) the contributions of phenocams and the PhenoCam Network, as reported in the pages of AFM, to the study of phenology; and (3) the lessons we learned from developing this grassroots effort. It also tells the story of the development and evolution of PhenoCam Network, and the fortuitious discoveries that led to PhenoCam. Thanks to AFM editors, Claudia Wagner-Riddle and Timothy Griffis, for the invitation to write this review!

Yujie and Mostafa attended the AmeriFlux meeting in central Massachusetts, which included a visit to Harvard Forest. Lab work presented at the meeting centered around the AmeriFlux Year of Remote Sensing theme. Yujie talked about her work on filling long gaps using boosted regression tree methods and including PhenoCam Gcc as a covariate, while Mostafa talked about canopy temperature measurements using thermal imaging. Andrew gave a virtual overview of PhenoCam (link to video), which was followed by former postdoc Adam Young’s presentation on integrating PhenoCam and tower flux measurements.

The usual group photo is below—who do you recognize?

In early October, Jenn Rudgers, Regents’ and Distinguished Professor of Biology at the University of New Mexico and Director, Sevilleta Long-Term Ecological Research Program, visited NAU and presented in the Ecoinformatics Seminar. Her seminar title was “Environmental variability at dryland ecotones: Research from the Sevilleta LTER.” Jenn’s presentation focused on the potential impacts of changing climate variance, rather than just changes in the mean climate. She talked about some of the underlying theory, gave several examples of recent studies from Sevilleta that help understand the ecological impacts of changing climate variance, and described the new Sevilleta Mean x Variance Experiment, which is being conducted in five different ecosystem types at the LTER. Thanks for your visit, Jenn!

Darby joined a group of Ecoss graduate students and faculty who participated in the Story Collider event at Kitt Recital Hall. The evening was organized as part of the Flagstaff Festival of Science, and was sponsored by NPRs Story Collider podcast and the Writing Class Radio podcast. The presenters, who had spent months developing and polishing their work, bravely shared stories that merged personal lives with science lives, in ways that were emotionally charged, deeply personal, and frequently humorous. After the event, Prof. Jane Marks wrote, “the audience laughed, they gasped, and I think a few shed some tears. It was a beautiful, moving show.” Congratulations, Darby!