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To celebrate the end of the 2024-25 academic year, the Richardson and Carbone Labs went out for a group lunch at Delhi Palace. Although the famous lunch buffet is no longer offered, the curries and naan were amazing as always, and nobody went home hungry.

Thanks to all lab members for their efforts over the last 12 months, it’s been another great year. Best wishes to everyone for a productive but relaxing summer.

From L to R: Austin, Gena, Connor, Oscar, Mostafa, Jen, Perry, Yujie, Andrew, and Mariah (Jacob and Darby were unfortunately out of town). Note the Richardson Lab t-shirts that Oscar and Jen are sporting!

The Spruce and Peatland Responses to Changing Environments (SPRUCE) project is a whole-ecosystem warming and elevated CO₂ experiment in the boreal peatland of Northern Minnesota’s Marcell Experimental Forest. The experiment has been running for 10 y (Andrew installed 10 PhenoCams at the site in August 2015), and treatments are scheduled to be turned off at the end of 2025.

In early May, project participants traveled to the Twin Cities for the final in-person SPRUCE “All-Hands Meeting,” which was packed with oral and poster presentations, and discussion groups to plan project syntheses, data-model comparisons, and final-year and post-treatment data collection. Perry was among the 26 poster presenters, and his poster detailed the phenological responses of leaves to warming observed through both PhenoCam and in-situ observations over the last 10 y. Perry also co-lead a group breakout discussion with Francisco Campos Arguedas (Kovaleski Lab, University of Wisconsin–Madison), where they posed questions related to the acute and chronic responses observed at SPRUCE (freeze events, heat waves, droughts, vs. long-term warming and elevated CO₂).

After returning to NAU, Perry commented that attending the meeting had been a great experience, and though he found it intimidating at first (“I was so impressed by everyone’s research!”) he also quickly discovered that “everyone was super-nice.”

Thanks for a super job representing the lab, Perry!

In late April, Oscar, Jen, Mariah and Andrew gave a lab tour to a group of visiting students from the Southern Nevada-Northern Arizona LSAMP ( Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation) program at UNLV. The group was introduced to equipment for measuring tree growth and gas exchange, as well as PhenoCams and thermal imaging.

The Flagstaff Gravity Lab is a local organization whose mission is “to foster an environment that lowers the activation energy to create, build, and grow technology companies in the environmental, life science, and aerospace/astronomy segments.” Their monthly “Colliders” are networking events that foster connections and inspire collaboration within the Flagstaff innovation community, including NAU. This month, Jen wrapped up a series of presentations by SICCS graduate students with an energetic and accessible lightning talk titled “Getting Hot In Here: Thermal Remote Sensing of Plant Canopies​.” Great job, Jen!

Led by former postdoc Adam Young (now at NEON), a preprint of the data paper for V3 of the curated and publicly-available PhenoCam dataset is now available online at Earth System Science Data, where it is undergoing open review.

PhenoCam V3.0 includes 738 unique sites and a total of 4805.5 site years, a 170 % increase relative to PhenoCam V2.0 (1783 site years), with notable expansion of network coverage for evergreen broadleaf forests, understory vegetation, grasslands, wetlands, and agricultural systems. This updated release now includes a PhenoCam-based estimate of the normalized difference vegetation index (cameraNDVI), calculated from back-to-back visible and visible+near-infrared images acquired from approximately 75 % of cameras in the network, which utilize a sliding infrared cut filter. 

Thanks to the whole PhenoCam team, and our site collaborators, for their efforts in support of making PhenoCam data open and FAIR!

Congratulations to Darby, who has been awarded funding from NAU’s Office of Graduate and Professional Studies in support of her work on changes in soil carbon cycling at the Hubbard Brook LTER site in New Hampshire.

And, congratulations to Jacob, who has been awarded a summer fellowship from the Sevilleta LTER in support of his field work on the impacts of changes in water availability on seasonality in creosote bush.

The Ecoss and ITS members of the PhenoCam team met up for lunch at NiMarco’s Pizza and a tour of the Monsoon HPC servers and storage. Although the team meets regularly on Zoom, this was the first opportunity for everyone to get together in person. Looking forward, we aim to have these kinds of get-togethers at least once a semester.

The favorite pizza? Probably the Popeye!

The picture below shows, from left, Devin Jay, Mike, Ethan, Oscar, Chris, Mostafa, Perry, and Keith.

The 5 minute video that Mariah, George, Drew, and Andrew did with NAU TV’s Erik Sather, Redwood Survival, is now streaming on the WildSound FestivalReviews platform. Previously, the film won several awards, including: Best Nature Film, Environmental Film and Screenplay Festival, 2023; Official Selection, Flagstaff Mountain Film Festival, 2023; Award of Merit Special Mention: Nature / Environment / Wildlife, Best Shorts Competition, 2023; and Semi-finalist, Melbourne Independent Film Festival, 2023.

During spring break, Jen visited travelled to Hermosillo, Mexico to visit former visiting student Teresa Ibarra at the Universidad de Sonora (UniSon). She gave a talk in the Departamento de Investigaciones Científicas y Tecnológicas (DICTUS) on the importance of near-surface thermal measurements and their application in ecological research. The trip wasn’t just about science and academia; she also enjoyed some tourist time exploring the Gulf of California.

We’ve got some new papers to report:

First, postdoc Yujie’s paper on using the XGBoost machine learning algorithm for gap filling CO₂ flux data is now out in Agricultural and Forest Meteorology. A highlight is that the algorithm is particularly good at filling long gaps that can’t be filled using conventional methods. Additionally, XGBoost is flexible enough to make incorporating new drivers (such as phenological information from satellites or phenocams) very easy!

Second, the paper “Recommendations for developing, documenting, and distributing data products derived from NEON data“, has been published in Ecosphere. The paper emerged from the July 2023 NEON Data Products Workshop, which was organized by Andrew and other members of the first cohort of NEON Ambassadors. Thanks to Jeff Atkins for his leadership and seeing the manuscript through to publication, and to all the early career scientist coauthors for their contributions.

Third, the paper “Predicting end‑of‑season timing across diverse North American grasslands“, by former postdoc Alison Post, is now out in Oecologia. The paper develops and evaluates a wide range of models for senescence in grassland ecosystems across the US, using PhenoCam Network data products as a primary resource.

Fourth, collaborator Roberto Silvestro’s paper, “From Roots to Leaves: Tree Growth Phenology in Forest Ecosystems“, is now out in Current Forestry Reports. Andrew wrote the PhenoCam section, and former postdoc Tim Rademacher also contributed.

Finally, collaborator Yunpeng Luo’s paper, “Internal physiological drivers of leaf development in trees: Understanding the relationship between non-­structural carbohydrates and leaf phenology“, is now out in Functional Ecology. Yunpeng previously visited the lab for a week after the AGU fall meeting 5 or 6 y ago.