There are lots of new additions to the Richardson-Carbone lab this spring! Kai Begay and Faith Kollinger are both undergraduates at CCC, and they started work in the lab in April. They’ll be improving their data analysis skills in R and Python, and working on PhenoCam-related projects for the next 12 months. They are both planning to transition to bachelor degree programs at NAU. Raul Valencia, an undergrad at UTEP, will be joining the group in mid-May. He will work for 2 weeks in Flagstaff before heading to New Mexico to participate in the Sevilleta LTER’s REU program for the summer, where he’ll work on soil CO2 flux measurements in a precipitation manipulation experiment. Mostafa Javadian, from U of A, joins the lab as a postdoc in June and will work on thermal imaging of forest canopies.
New paper in Radiocarbon
The paper led by Mariah Carbone, “Atmospheric radiocarbon for the period 1910-2021 recorded by annual plants” has just been published in the journal Radiocarbon. The paper draws on archived samples from NAU’s Deaver Herbarium to reconstruct a smoothed record representative of the Colorado Plateau for “bomb spike” 14C dating of recent terrestrial organic matter. The paper concludes that “archived annual plants serve as faithful scribes: samples from herbaria around the Earth may be an under-utilized resource to improve understanding of the modern carbon cycle.” Mariah was interviewed by KNAU’s Melissa Sevigny after the paper came out.
Spring Farewell
We had a lab happy hour on April 13 to say farewell to Postdoc Alison Post (moving on to a position at EarthLab, CU Boulder), PhD graduate and Postdoc Aaron Teets (moving on to a position with the Forest Service’s FIA program in Olympia, Washington), and visiting MS student Deklan Mengering (returning to Dalhousie University in Halifax). It was a cool spring evening, but the burning fire pits were warm and the Mother Road beverages were cold. We had a fine turnout and a good time was had by all! Alison, Aaron and Deklan—we will miss you.
