Month: November 2024

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!