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Andrew is Co-I on the Sevilleta Long-Term Ecological Research proposal, led by PI Prof. Jenn Rudgers at the University of New Mexico, which has recently been awarded funding by the National Science Foundation. Andrew and Jacob are actively involved in the MVE (Mean x Variance Experiment), with 72 phenocams tracking daily changes in canopy greenness across 4 different biomes. You can read the UNM press release here.

SICCS junior Devin Jay San Nicolas joined the PhenoCam project team at the end of the Fall 2024 semester. Born in Guam, Devin Jay has lived in Phoenix since 2016. In 2022, he enrolled in the BS in Computer Science program at NAU, and he expects to graduate in 2026. Devin brings skills related to debugging and software engineering to the PhenoCam team. His ultimate career goal is game development. Outside of work and school he likes to dive into his own personal projects: writing game scripts, designing enemies and levels, implementing gameplay mechanics. When he’s not doing that, however, Devin likes to watch movies and TV shows with his family and friends. He is also fond of large snakes!

Welcome aboard, Devin Jay!

Former postdoc Drew Peltier’s paper, “Decades-old carbon reserves are widespread among tree species, constrained only by sapwood longevity,” which uses a model-based approach to investigate how the distribution, mixing, and turnover of reserves vary across trees and species, has been just been published. Using data from 9 different species, Drew’s analysis shows that deep mixing and rapid turnover indicate that most photosynthate is rapidly metabolized. But, results also indicate that ecological variation in reserve ages is enormous, perhaps driven by stress and disturbance. Across all species, maximum reserve ages appear primarily constrained by sapwood longevity, and thus old reserves are probably widespread.

Andrew was a member of the first cohort of NEON Ambassadors, a diverse group of researchers and educators tasked with promoting the use of NEON data and growing the NEON user community. Together with fellow Ambassadors Jeff Atkins (USDA FS), Kelly Aho (Michigan State), Andrew Elmore (UMCES), and Danica Lombardozzi (Colorado State), he organized a virtual workshop for early career scientists in the summer of 2023. The workshop’s objective was to come up with guidelines for best practices in creating, validating, and using data products derived from NEON data. The workshop resulted in a paper that has just been published in Ecosphere, “Recommendations for developing, documenting, and distributing data products derived from NEON data.” The organizing committee thanks NEON for sponsoring the Ambassador program and this workshop.

Darby, Yujie, and Andrew are coauthors on a paper led by Jeffrey Uyekawa and Ben Lucas of NAU’s Department of Mathematics and Statistics in a special Landscape Ecology section of the journal Land. The study uses the Extreme Gradient Boosting machine learning model to model land-atmosphere CO₂ fluxes, at 30 minute temporal resolution, across 44 NEON sites. In addition to standard k-fold cross-validation techniques, the study applies a “leave-one-site-out” (L1SO) approach to test predictions at a site which had not been used, in any way, to train the model. The results show strong potential for machine learning-based models to make more skillful predictions than state-of-the-art process-based models, being able to estimate the multi-year mean carbon balance to within an error ±50 gCm⁻²y⁻¹ for 29 of 44 test sites. L1SO model performance was better when ecologically similar sites were included in the training data, and worse when there were no similar sites in the training data (e.g., more unique ecosystems in the Pacific Northwest, Florida, and Puerto Rico). Results also point to the enormous potential of machine learning to predict not only the long-term carbon balance of an unknown site, but even the inter-annual variation in that carbon balance.  These results have significant implications for being able to accurately predict the carbon flux or gap-fill an extended outage at any AmeriFlux site, and for being able to make skillful predictions of ecosystem-scale carbon balance in support of natural climate solutions.

A companion paper on water fluxes is in preparation.

NEON tower at Niwot Ridge, Colorado (courtesy of NEON).

Mark D. Schwartz, University of Wisconsin–Milwaukee, is well-known for his pioneering efforts—beginning in the 1980s—to bring the science of phenology into the modern era. He is also highly regarded as the editor of the book Phenology: An Integrative Environmental Science. The third edition of this book, published by Springer, was recently released. Across 644 pages, the book’s 27 chapters span a wide range of topics. You’ll see lab members’ names on several of those chapters:

• Perry and Andrew wrote the chapter on Mesic Temperate Deciduous Forest Phenology. Special congratulations to Perry on his first first-author publication!

• Oscar and Andrew wrote an updated version of the chapter on Near-Surface Sensor-Derived Phenology.

• Darby and Andrew contributed to the chapter on Phenology in Higher Education, which was led by long-time collaborator Theresa Crimmins of the USA-National Phenology Network.

The Autumn-Winter 2024 edition of Redwoods Magazine, published by Save the Redwoods League (SRL), includes an article by writer Kathleen Ok-Soo Richards on “the hidden, interwoven relationship between fog and coast redwoods.” The article focuses on new research funded by SRL to “better understand how coast redwoods might adapt to shifting fog patterns in the future and how we can support them.” One of three projects highlighted is the work Andrew and George Koch are doing to investigate whether seasonal and daily tree growth is related to nighttime fog availability. With a new grant awarded in December 2024, ongoing work at the southern edge of range of coast redwood will be complemented by a new study at the Sequoia Park Zoo in Eureka, California, where fog is a far more regular occurrence. In addition to installing instruments to measure tree growth and water stress, Andrew will be moving his Vaisala ceilometer to the new research site to provide detailed information on fog conditions.

Thanks to SRL for supporting this work!

Photo by Max Forster, https://www.savetheredwoods.org/

This semester, we had two visiting students in the lab, Francisco and Teresa.

After the AGU meeting, Francisco returned to his native Ecuador for the holidays. He will resume his studies at Newcastle University in the new year.

Teresa’s parents, Clara and Pablo, made the long trip up from Hermosillo, Mexico, to visit Flagstaff in mid-December at the end of Teresa’s visit. Teresa will resume her studies at the Universdad de Sonora (UniSon) in the new year. The photo below Teresa with her parents (very happy and proud that she is “fulfilling her dreams of becoming a scientist”) at the entrance to the Ecoss suite. Teresa returns to Mexico with a StarDot NetCam SC in hand and plans to push for greater Mexican involvement in the PhenoCam network. This is a collaborative opportunity Andrew has been looking forward to for years; in the paper describing Version 2 of the PhenoCam dataset, it was noted that “most of Mexico emerge[s] as poorly-represented in this analysis. These […] areas […] should be targeted for further expansion of the network.” We hope Teresa’s visit can help make this dream a reality!

Thank you Francisco and Teresa for your visits and your contributions to the lab this semester. We all look forward to future collaborations, and the long-term friendships that result from these kinds of visits. Best wishes for 2024!

Another December, another AGU! The lab was well-represented in Washington, D.C., for the “What’s Next for Science?” theme year, with in-person attendance by Mostafa, Jen, Yujie, and Francisco (top photo). Highlights included: 

• Two sessions (bottom right photo) organized by Mostafa, “Advancing Environmental Monitoring Through Near-Surface Imaging Technologies: Capabilities, Applications, and Future Directions” and “Understanding Phenological Responses, Changes, and Feedbacks: Patterns, Mechanisms, and Consequences.”
• Two talks by Jen (AGU first-timer!), “The Great Thermal Bake–Off: A Hands-On Workshop for Enhancing TemperatureMeasurement Precision and Standardization for Improved Flux Interpretation and Application” and “Deciphering the Controls on the Canopy-to-Air Temperature Gradient Across Diverse Plant Functional Types.” 
• Yujie had a talk, “Evaluating continuity of NEON and AmeriFlux data records at collocated sites from tundra to subtropics” (bottom left photo shows Yujie and Dave Moore, University of Arizona).  
• Francisco had a talk, “Optimising Traffic Camera Networks for Long-Term Phenological Monitoring Via Advanced Image Clustering Techniques.”
• Mostafa also had a poster, “Tracking vegetation phenology across diverse biomes using Version 3.0 of the PhenoCam Dataset.” 

Next year’s AGU meeting is in New Orleans, Louisiana — see you there!

Sam Illingworth is a science communication scholar from the UK. Sam’s particular area of interest is poetry as a communication tool, and every week he picks a new paper, writes a nontechnical summary, and crafts a poem – which he then records and posts online.  Sam shared his unique approach to science communication this semester in an engaging and highly creative virtual presentation for the Ecoinformatics Seminar. Follow-on communication between Andrew and Sam led to Sam using the recent PNAS paper by former lab visitor Raquel Alfaro-Sánchez  as inspiration for this week’s poetry creation and blog post.

Sam’s evocative reading of his poem, Drunken Forests, is available on SoundCloud through the link below.

Thanks, Sam, for helping us to share this work with a wider audience!