Month: March 2024

Just before they put him on the shuttle to PHX, Andrew, Mariah, and Kivi took Paul for a late-season ski adventure at the Arizona Nordic Village. Conditions were marginal but the weather was fantastic and a good time was had by all. It was a great way to wrap up Paul’s visit, and an excellent reminder of the importance of maintaining a good work-life balance!

Congratulations to Jacob, who was awarded a summer fellowship to support his field research at the SEV LTER on the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge near La Joya, New Mexico. Jacob will be in residence at the nearby UNM field station, will mentor an REU student, and will be conducting chlorophyll fluorescence measurements in the MVE precipitation manipulation plots.

Paul Stoy, a professor at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, and long-time collaborator on various FLUXNET projects, visited the lab for a week after spring break. Paul presented his ALIVE project, which uses high temporal frequency GOES-R data to model GPP in real time across North America, in the Ecoinformatics Seminar. In addition to meeting with many students and faculty at NAU, the lab organized a “tourist program” that included a visit to Walnut Canyon National Monument.

The photo below shows the large crowd that gathered for happy hour with Paul at Mother Road Brewing Co.

Andrew’s paper, “Experimental Whole-Ecosystem Warming Enables Novel Estimation of Snow Cover and Depth Sensitivities to Temperature, and Quantification of the Snow-Albedo Feedback Effect” was published in JGR Biogeosciences this week. The paper leverages the whole-ecosystem warming experiment at SPRUCE to quantify how snow duration, depth, and fractional cover vary with warming of up to +9°C. Every snow-related quantity examined was found to decline precipitously as the amount of warming increased. A paired-plot approach was used to estimate the magnitude of the snow-albedo feedback effect. Albedo-driven warming linked to reduced snow cover varies between December (+0.4°C increase in maximum air temperature) and March (+1.2°C increase) because of differences in insolation. A key take-home of the paper is that even modest future warming will have profound impacts on northern winters and cold-season ecosystem processes.

The figure below, from the paper’s supplemental information, shows the clear impact of warming on plot-level snow cover. Images were recorded during a drone flight on January 14, 2020.

Jen received funding from FLUXNET to support an in-person workshop, to be held during the summer of 2024 at NAU’s Hat Ranch field station, focused on measurements of canopy temperature using thermal imaging. The workshop has two goals:

1. Cross-Instrument Comparison & Standardization: Establish and test processing standards for thermal instruments through a field campaign, encompassing preprocessing, installation, and post-processing, to ensure consistency and reliability across devices.
2. Build Community Engagement around a ThermalCam Network: Enhance the accessibility and usability of thermal data within the broader scientific community, fostering a supportive network for sharing and innovation.

For more information, visit the workshop home page.

Congratulations to Jen and her workshop leadership team, which also includes Mostafa and SICCS PhD student Ben Wiebe, on obtaining this funding!

In early March, Mostafa was the invited speaker in the SICCS Ecoinformatics Seminar, which attracts ecologically- and environmentally-minded data scientists from across campus. Mostafa’s presentation, “Hot or Not? How Thermal Imaging Reveals the Hidden Language of Plants,” focused on what we can learn from longwave thermal imaging—at wavelengths well beyond the visible spectrum—of plant canopies can tell us about leaf physiology, stress, energy balance, and water fluxes.