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Jacob, Perry, and Andrew drove to north-western New Mexico last week to meet up with the ITS team at Navajo Tech and resuscitate the PhenoCam that was installed there three years ago. Unfortunately, the camera had to be replaced, but Andrew enjoyed the opportunity to engage in some tower climbing, and thanks to Dody Begay and Alex Perry, NTU ITS, the visit was a success!

This week, Jacob spent some time sharing the power of PhenoCams with the kiddos at Flagstaff’s De Miguel Elementary School. He taught a phenology lesson titled “Monitoring plants with cameras!” to Ms. Ten Haken’s (NAU alumna) 5th grade class. Students learned what phenology is and why it’s important, via an exploration of the PhenoCam Network map page. These sorts of outreach activities are crucial for getting kids excited about science and ecosystem ecology more specifically.

After the visit, Jacob reported that students “LOVED the map and had lots of questions about how phenology connects to things they’ve learned about already such as photosynthesis and astronomy.”

Thanks to Ms. Haken for giving Jacob (and the lab) this outreach opportunity!

In mid-January, Jacob made a trip to the New Mexico desert for the annual Sevilleta LTER All-Hands Meeting. The All-Hands Meeting brings together Sevilleta scientists, land managers, and community members for a couple days of research updates, field visits, and collaboration creation. The meeting took place at the Sevilleta Field Station this year, which meant lots of lowkey science chats over meals and catching up with distant colleagues like Drew Peltier, former lab postdoc now an assistant professor at UNLV. Jacob presented a poster on his Mean-Variance Experiment (MVE) creosote physiology ideas and a talk about what the MVE PhenoCams are teaching us about biosphere-atmosphere interactions in drylands. Andrew shared a pre-recorded talk describing the history of PhenoCams at the Sevilleta. Photos show the group dinner after the first day of the meeting and the MVE PJ on a bluebird day.

At the Biology Graduate Student Symposium, Darby presented her research on carbon fluxes at the Bartlett Experimental Forest, where 20 years of data indicate a declining trend in carbon uptake driven by increasing ecosystem respiration. Her results show that ecosystem respiration is rising during both the winter months and the growing season. In recent years, carbon losses in winter have not been offset by carbon uptake during the growing season. Increases in soil temperature anomalies are a key driver of rising winter ecosystem respiration. Symposium attendees asked insightful questions, including: (1) What does a warming winter mean for plants? (2) Do you expect the carbon balance to continue declining? (3) Could this research influence climate policy?

Darby reported that, “Overall, it was an exciting opportunity to share science with an audience beyond ecosystem ecologists!”

Led by Jen, Mostafa, and Ben Wiebe, a report on the Great Thermal Bake-Off workshop, held at NAU’s historic Hat Ranch property in August 2024, has just been published in the AGU newsmagazine, Eos. Congratulations to the organizing team! Thermal remote sensing continues to be a hot topic!

Congratulations to Oscar Zimmerman, who passed his candidacy exam in late January. Oscar plans to research the seasonality of photosynthesis and tree growth in arid scrublands, but joked “I can’t wait to complete my thesis on tropical fish!” when the exam was over.

The photo shows Andrew, Oscar, and Oscar’s tropical fish.

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 Jay 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, and implementing gameplay mechanics. When he’s not doing that, however, Devin Jay 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.