Arizona Research Computing, in partnership with Arizona’s major universities and the Sun Corridor Network, leverages supercomputing and data stewardship to drive innovation across the state. Earlier this fall, Andrew was interviewed for a video, “Arizona Research Computing: Enhancing research with computing and data stewardship,” showcasing how advanced computing resources enable groundbreaking research with direct benefits for Arizona’s environment, economy, and communities, emphasizing its substantial impact on Arizona. The video, featuring some great footage of work in the redwoods and also PhenoCam time lapses, was shown at the recent SC24 conference in Atlanta, Georgia, where the meeting theme was “HPC Creates.”
We had another fantastic lineup of speakers in Andrew’s class INF 623, Ecoinformatics Seminar. Mostafa provided invaluable TA support and technical assistance – thank you!
Thanks to all the speakers for their fantastic and diverse presentations.
Seminar resumes in January with another great lineup for Spring 2025.
Way back in 2022, Raquel Alfaro-Sánchez (a postdoc at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada) visited the lab to learn about nonstructural carbohydrate (NSC) analyses. During her visit, she analyzed samples from black spruce trees collected from 15 sites in low subarctic and high-mid boreal forests in the Northwest Territories, Canada. The sites varied in the depth and stability of permafrost. Results from Raquel’s work have been published in the paper, “Permafrost instability negates the positive impact of warming temperatures on boreal radial growth“, out this week in PNAS.
Also this week, former postdoc Drew Peltier’s paper, “Decades-old carbon reserves are widespread among tree species, constrained only by sapwood longevity“, has been published in New Phytologist. Drew’s paper synthesizes data on the radiocarbon (14C) content of NSCs in nine different tree species, including evergreen conifers, and both ring- and diffuse-porous angiosperms. The 14C data enable estimation of the age of NSC reserves, and were used with a new model describing the distribution of NSC reserves across rings to investigate how the distribution, mixing, and turnover of reserves vary across trees and species. Drew’s paper shows that deep mixing and rapid turnover indicate most photosynthate is rapidly metabolized. Across species, maximum reserve ages appear primarily constrained by sapwood longevity, and thus old reserves are probably widespread.
Coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens; SESE) was one of the nine species included in Drew’s recent paper. This photo shows Alatna Richardson at the base of a spectacular SESE known as Triclops, in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, California.
Oscar, Teresa, Perry, and Darby visited Grand Canyon Elementary School as part of the Flagstaff Festival of Science In-School Speaker Program. They worked with 3rd through 5th graders to explore phenology, ecosystems, and how PhenoCams are used to monitor seasonal changes in plants. Each classroom received a brief introduction to these topics, followed by a variety of hands-on activities. Students arranged PhenoCam images of ecosystems by season, identified ecosystem disturbances like droughts and wildfires through photos, and matched images to the correct ecosystem type. There were also fall-themed arts and crafts projects to connect science with creativity. The fifth graders had the opportunity to explore the PhenoCam website, using the map to investigate seasonality at different locations. Fourth graders were deeply engaged, asking thoughtful questions and contributing insightful answers during the activities. In the third-grade classroom, Teresa, a visiting graduate student, provided a multilingual element by teaching students how to say the four seasons in Spanish. Overall, it was a successful outreach event — thanks to the elementary school teachers for the invitation!
During the first weekend of November, Jacob travelled to Washington to attend the 18th annual Graduate Climate Conference. Hosted at the University of Washington’s Pack Forest in the foothills of Mount Rainier, the Conference was organized by graduate students for graduate students to discuss ongoing research related to Earth’s climate system. Presentation topics ranged from atmospheric river patterns over the western U.S. to food security in the Arctic to the global vegetation response to rising vapor pressure deficit. The purpose of the Conference is for students studying climate-related topics to learn from each other and create interdisciplinary research collaborations.
Jacob gave a talk on the research he’s conducting at the Sevilleta LTER Mean-Variance Experiment to better understand how desert vegetation will respond to a drier and more variable climate across the southwest U.S. His talk was titled The Future Carbon Sequestration Potential of Chihuahuan Desert Ecosystems. Following the Conference, he spent a day playing tourist in Seattle with fellow attendees.
In late October, Oscar and visiting student Francisco made a trip down to the Cedar Mesa AmeriFlux site in southeastern Utah. They installed a number of new instruments at the site that will contribute to Oscar’s research on the seasonality of pinyon-juniper woodlands. These included thermistors within the stems of six trees (also instrumented with Tomst dendrometers and East 30 sap flow sensors), an Apogee infrared radiometer, and two Skye 4-channel light sensors for measuring spectral reflectance across a total of 8 visible and near-infrared wavebands.
Francisco later commented, “I enjoyed seeing how the setup at Cedar Mesa combines different instruments to monitor how trees in the pinyon-juniper woodland respond to their environment. Learning how these tools come together to monitor ecosystem health and resilience was inspiring”.
Apart from the science activities, Francisco also got to experience a number of landscapes and landmarks of the Southwest during the trip, including Comb Ridge, the Moki Dugway, and iconic Monument Valley. Sounds like a great time!
This week for the ever-popular Ecoinformatics Seminar Series, we had an in-person visit from Dr. Renée Brown from the University of New Mexico’s Department of Biology. Renée is also involved with the National Science Foundation’s McMurdo Dry Valleys Long-Term Ecological Research Program. Renée’s talk gave an overview of her research on the effects of global change on dryland ecosystems ranging from the Chihuahuan Desert to Antarctica (which is, in fact, the world’s largest desert). She also discussed her career trajectory and provided insights into the importance of sensor networks for studying ecological processes across spatial and temporal scales.
Aside from her seminar talk, many folks in the lab and across ECOSS met with Renée over the course of her visit to chat about science and life. Her visit concluded with a lively happy hour on Monday evening, and a snowy stroll through the aspens before she headed home on Tuesday afternoon. Thank you, Renée, for the wonderful visit!
Darby, Oscar, and Mostafa led two well-attended PhenoCam training workshops as part of the AmeriFlux Management Project webinar series, engaging over 50 participants. In the first session, held on October 11, Oscar and Mostafa provided an introduction to the PhenoCam Network and guided participants on how to navigate the PhenoCam website. The second session, on October 18, featured Darby leading an interactive data activity on a cloud platform, demonstrating how to integrate PhenoCam data with eddy covariance flux tower data. The resources from both sessions are available here. Also, the recordings are available here: Part 1 and Part 2.
After the workshop, Darby reported: “This was the best turnout we’ve had yet for a training sessions, and we had a lot of great questions from the audience, particularly about how researchers can apply these tools to data from their own sites.”
Mostafa’s paper, “Scaling Individual Tree Transpiration With Thermal Cameras Reveals Interspecies Differences to Drought Vulnerability,” was published this week in the AGU journal, Geophysical Research Letters (GRL). Using canopy temperature data from thermal cameras, Mostafa estimated the transpiration rates of individual trees at Harvard Forest and Niwot Ridge with the PT-JPL model. Tree-level analysis revealed species-specific responses to drought, with lodgepole pine exhibiting greater tolerance than Engelmann spruce at Niwot and red oak showing greater tolerance than red maple at Harvard. These findings show how ecophysiological differences between species result in varying responses to drought and demonstrate that these responses can be characterized by deriving transpiration from crown temperature measurements.
The Annual AISES (American Indian Science and Engineering Society) National Conference is a unique, three-day event focusing on educational, professional, and workforce development for Indigenous peoples of North America and the Pacific Islands in science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM) studies and careers. Kai and other members of NAU’s AISES chapter recently traveled to San Antonio for the 2024 conference. Kai presented a poster on how the lab is using PhenoCams to track responses to precipitation manipulation treatments at the SEV MVE (Mean X Variance Experiment). After the conference, Kai reported that “it was a great experience and I’m happy to have made new connections in academia!”
