The Richardson Lab hosted Mallery Quetawki, an artist and member of the Zuni pueblo who uses art as a tool to bring together Western science and traditional knowledge. Mallery gave a wonderful presentation in the Ecoinformatics Seminar titled “Communicating Environmental Health Science to Native Communities through Native-themed and Native-created Art,” which attracted the largest audience of any seminar we’ve had in the last 4 years and was a fantastic way to kick off the new semester.
One of the paintings Mallery discussed in seminar, DNA Repair, is shown below and is reproduced with Mallery’s permission. You can read more about her work on her webpage.
Jen Diehl’s late-summer BBQ has become an annual tradition and this year’s get-together was bigger and better than ever. Thanks, Jen, for the opportunity to get together with friends and colleagues at the start of the semester!
Jen Diehl, a rising G3 in the SICCS T3 program in Ecoinformatics, successfully defended her research prospectus today and advanced to the “PhD Candidate” stage. Lab members, fellow members of SICCS and Ecoss, and other random friends and colleagues all gathered at our favorite off-campus location (“Building 7”) to celebrate. Ecoss Associate Director Matt Bowker (back right) showed up to make sure things didn’t get too out of control. Congratulations, Jen!
Summer schools are a great opportunity for in-depth learning about subjects that aren’t often covered in graduate-level curricula.
This year, Oscar participated in the 2-week “FluxCourse” (top photo) held at the Mountain Research Station, Niwot Ridge, Colorado, where he learned carbon and water flux measurements from leaves to ecosystems, and applications of remote sensing, modeling and data assimilation, to interpret, extrapolate, and scale fluxes in time and space.
Natasha and Perry participated in the two-week “New Advances in Land Carbon Cycle Modeling” course (bottom photo), organized by collaborator Yiqi Luo, at Cornell. They learned how use process-based modeling, data assimilation, and machine learning to better understand the terrestrial carbon cycle.
Many lab members took advantage of the summer months to work on projects from the Southwest to the Northeast (and Hawaii, too).
Oscar visited his field site on Cedar Mesa, Utah, where he installed sap flow sensors, dendrometers, and a phenocam in the AmeriFlux (US-CdM) tower footprint.
Austin traveled to the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge, New Mexico, to help REU student Raul Valencia with soil respiration measurements (see the photo below of Raul taking FluxPuppy for a walk); he also visited his own field site at the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab, near Crested Butte, CO.
Jacob helped out with a new field installation at Sevilleta, but spent most of the summer wrapping up his undergraduate research at the RainMan experiment south of Tucson, which aims to understand the impacts of shifting precipitation patterns on Sonoran desert ecosystem functioning. We look forward to his arrival in Flagstaff later this summer!
Darby toured our long-running AmeriFlux (US-Bar) tower site at the Bartlett Experimental Forest, New Hampshire, now in its 20th year of measurements. She also collected soil samples from the Barre Woods soil warming study and EBIS plots at Harvard Forest, Massachusetts (see the photo below of Darby extracting soil cores at Harvard Forest using a HoleHawg) for radiocarbon analysis on NAU’s MICADAS to estimate turnover times of different horizons and density fractions.
On vacation in Hawaii, Andrew successfully got the “kamuela2” phenocam, near the Big Island town of Waimea, back online. The camera has been in operation since 2019, after the original “kamuela” phenocam was in operation from 2010 through 2018.
Meetings and conferences are all about learning about the latest cutting-edge research, presenting one’s own work, catching up with old friends, and making new friends. It was a busy summer for the lab!
In early July, Darby attended the annual Hubbard Brook Cooperator’s Meeting in Plymouth, New Hampshire, where she had the chance to meet other members of the Hubbard Brook LTER team, and give a presentation on her planned thesis research.
In mid-July, Yujie and Jen attended the “Linking Optical and Energy Fluxes Workshop” held at the Mountain Research Station, Niwot Ridge, Colorado. Jen co-led a workshop on thermal imaging with long-time collaborator Chris Still, and Yujie presented a poster, “Assessing Ecological Similarity of Minimally-Overlapping Flux Footprints through Analysis of NEON AOP.” The usual photo of workshop participants was taken this time using a FLIR thermal camera (see below).
Also in mid-July, Andrew and other NEON Ambassadors co-led the 4-day virtual workshop, “Exploring NEON Derived Data Products,” which was attended by about 20 participants from a range of disciplines, career stages, and backgrounds. A paper, “Recommendations for developing, documenting, and distributing derived data products from NEON data,” is in preparation by workshop participants and organizational team.
In early August, Natasha, Jacob, and Drew (as well as former lab postdoc Alison Post) all presented research at the ESA meeting in Portland, Oregon: Natasha gave an oral talk on her work using phenocam data to improve soil respiration modeling (bottom left); Jacob presented a poster on his RainMan research (bottom right); Drew gave an invited oral presentation on using modeling to understand mixing of old and new storage reserves in trees across a wide ecological range; and Alison gave a talk on her work to model grassland senescence.
For ecologists and earth system scientists, summer means a lot of different things—but most associate summer with field work, meetings and conferences, summer schools, and writing time. In a series of posts over the next week, we’ll look at how members of the Carbone-Richardson lab spent the summer of 2023.
Led by Christina Schädel, our new paper using data from the SPRUCE experiment, “Using long-term data from a whole ecosystem warming experiment to identify best spring and autumn phenology models,” has been published in Plant-Environment Interactions. The analysis leverages experimental warming of up to +9°C, as well as interannual variation in temperatures, to more effectively test a wide range of spring and autumn phenological models.
One of our phenocam images was chosen to appear on the cover, shown below.
PI Mariah Carbone’s $1 million proposal to the Department of Energy’s Environmental System Science (ESS) program, “Responses of plant and microbial respiration sources to changing cold-season climate drivers in the East River watershed”, was selected for funding. The project team includes Mariah, Andrew, Ben Lucas (Math & Stats, NAU), and PhD student Austin Simonpietri, as well as NCAR collaborators Adrianna Foster and Will Wieder. The research will take place at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, near Crested Butte, CO. Read the NAU Review article here.
