Month: November 2023

Natasha had the opportunity to participate in a workshop focused on phenological monitoring in the dry tropics, which was held at the Ongava Research Centre in Namibia. The workshop was organized as part of the PhenoChange project, coordinated by Kyle Dexter of the University of Edinburgh. Natasha met colleagues from around the world, presented the lab’s own work with the PhenoCam Network and applications to modeling ecosystem processes, assisted with field work, and even went on a few Safari drives!

Sophie Fauset, from the University of Plymouth, and her student William Brown, visited the lab for a week in early November. Sophie is PI of the netCTF, or Network for Monitoring Canopy Temperature of Forests, a project funded by the U.K.’s Natural Environment Research Council in 2020. Sophie and William presented their work at the BiFOR (Birmingham Institute of Forest Research) FACE (Free Air CO₂ Enrichment) facility in the UK and at the Forestry Research Institute of Ghana in a mini-symposium on canopy temperature that was organized by Jen. Jen, Mostafa, Sophie, and William also worked together on camera calibration and image processing protocols, including head-to-head field testing of thermal cameras manufactured by FLUKE and FLIR.

Mariah’s paper, “Interannual precipitation controls on soil CO₂ fluxes in high elevation conifer and aspen forests,” has been published in Environmental Research Letters. This work is the result of a dozen years of field measurements (with some help from Andrew) at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory in Gothic, Colorado. The analysis shows that soil CO₂ fluxes are sensitive to rainfall in the current growing season, as well as snowfall in the previous winter. Our newly-funded DOE project, leveraging the Snodgrass mountain transect, will build on these results.