Month: December 2024

The Autumn-Winter 2024 edition of Redwoods Magazine, published by Save the Redwoods League (SRL), includes an article by writer Kathleen Ok-Soo Richards on “the hidden, interwoven relationship between fog and coast redwoods.” The article focuses on new research funded by SRL to “better understand how coast redwoods might adapt to shifting fog patterns in the future and how we can support them.” One of three projects highlighted is the work Andrew and George Koch are doing to investigate whether seasonal and daily tree growth is related to nighttime fog availability. With a new grant awarded in December 2024, ongoing work at the southern edge of range of coast redwood will be complemented by a new study at the Sequoia Park Zoo in Eureka, California, where fog is a far more regular occurrence. In addition to installing instruments to measure tree growth and water stress, Andrew will be moving his Vaisala ceilometer to the new research site to provide detailed information on fog conditions.

Thanks to SRL for supporting this work!

Photo by Max Forster, https://www.savetheredwoods.org/

This semester, we had two visiting students in the lab, Francisco and Teresa.

After the AGU meeting, Francisco returned to his native Ecuador for the holidays. He will resume his studies at Newcastle University in the new year.

Teresa’s parents, Clara and Pablo, made the long trip up from Hermosillo, Mexico, to visit Flagstaff in mid-December at the end of Teresa’s visit. Teresa will resume her studies at the Universdad de Sonora (UniSon) in the new year. The photo below Teresa with her parents (very happy and proud that she is “fulfilling her dreams of becoming a scientist”) at the entrance to the Ecoss suite. Teresa returns to Mexico with a StarDot NetCam SC in hand and plans to push for greater Mexican involvement in the PhenoCam network. This is a collaborative opportunity Andrew has been looking forward to for years; in the paper describing Version 2 of the PhenoCam dataset, it was noted that “most of Mexico emerge[s] as poorly-represented in this analysis. These […] areas […] should be targeted for further expansion of the network.” We hope Teresa’s visit can help make this dream a reality!

Thank you Francisco and Teresa for your visits and your contributions to the lab this semester. We all look forward to future collaborations, and the long-term friendships that result from these kinds of visits. Best wishes for 2024!

Another December, another AGU! The lab was well-represented in Washington, D.C., for the “What’s Next for Science?” theme year, with in-person attendance by Mostafa, Jen, Yujie, and Francisco (top photo). Highlights included: 

• Two sessions (bottom right photo) organized by Mostafa, “Advancing Environmental Monitoring Through Near-Surface Imaging Technologies: Capabilities, Applications, and Future Directions” and “Understanding Phenological Responses, Changes, and Feedbacks: Patterns, Mechanisms, and Consequences.”
• Two talks by Jen (AGU first-timer!), “The Great Thermal Bake–Off: A Hands-On Workshop for Enhancing TemperatureMeasurement Precision and Standardization for Improved Flux Interpretation and Application” and “Deciphering the Controls on the Canopy-to-Air Temperature Gradient Across Diverse Plant Functional Types.” 
• Yujie had a talk, “Evaluating continuity of NEON and AmeriFlux data records at collocated sites from tundra to subtropics” (bottom left photo shows Yujie and Dave Moore, University of Arizona).  
• Francisco had a talk, “Optimising Traffic Camera Networks for Long-Term Phenological Monitoring Via Advanced Image Clustering Techniques.”
• Mostafa also had a poster, “Tracking vegetation phenology across diverse biomes using Version 3.0 of the PhenoCam Dataset.” 

Next year’s AGU meeting is in New Orleans, Louisiana — see you there!

Sam Illingworth is a science communication scholar from the UK. Sam’s particular area of interest is poetry as a communication tool, and every week he picks a new paper, writes a nontechnical summary, and crafts a poem – which he then records and posts online.  Sam shared his unique approach to science communication this semester in an engaging and highly creative virtual presentation for the Ecoinformatics Seminar. Follow-on communication between Andrew and Sam led to Sam using the recent PNAS paper by former lab visitor Raquel Alfaro-Sánchez  as inspiration for this week’s poetry creation and blog post.

Sam’s evocative reading of his poem, Drunken Forests, is available on SoundCloud through the link below.

Thanks, Sam, for helping us to share this work with a wider audience!

Arizona Research Computing, in partnership with Arizona’s major universities and the Sun Corridor Network, leverages supercomputing and data stewardship to drive innovation across the state. Earlier this fall, Andrew was interviewed for a video, “Arizona Research Computing: Enhancing research with computing and data stewardship,” showcasing how advanced computing resources enable groundbreaking research with direct benefits for Arizona’s environment, economy, and communities, emphasizing its substantial impact on Arizona. The video, featuring some great footage of work in the redwoods and also PhenoCam time lapses, was shown at the recent SC24 conference in Atlanta, Georgia, where the meeting theme was “HPC Creates.”

We had another fantastic lineup of speakers in Andrew’s class INF 623, Ecoinformatics Seminar. Mostafa provided invaluable TA support and technical assistance – thank you!

Thanks to all the speakers for their fantastic and diverse presentations.

Seminar resumes in January with another great lineup for Spring 2025.

Way back in 2022, Raquel Alfaro-Sánchez (a postdoc at Wilfrid Laurier University in Waterloo, Canada) visited the lab to learn about nonstructural carbohydrate (NSC) analyses. During her visit, she analyzed samples from black spruce trees collected from 15 sites in low subarctic and high-mid boreal forests in the Northwest Territories, Canada. The sites varied in the depth and stability of permafrost. Results from Raquel’s work have been published in the paper, “Permafrost instability negates the positive impact of warming temperatures on boreal radial growth“, out this week in PNAS.

Also this week, former postdoc Drew Peltier’s paper, “Decades-old carbon reserves are widespread among tree species, constrained only by sapwood longevity“, has been published in New Phytologist. Drew’s paper synthesizes data on the radiocarbon (¹⁴C) content of NSCs in nine different tree species, including evergreen conifers, and both ring- and diffuse-porous angiosperms. The ¹⁴C data enable estimation of the age of NSC reserves, and were used with a new model describing the distribution of NSC reserves across rings to investigate how the distribution, mixing, and turnover of reserves vary across trees and species. Drew’s paper shows that deep mixing and rapid turnover indicate most photosynthate is rapidly metabolized. Across species, maximum reserve ages appear primarily constrained by sapwood longevity, and thus old reserves are probably widespread.

Coast redwood (Sequoia sempervirens; SESE) was one of the nine species included in Drew’s recent paper. This photo shows Alatna Richardson at the base of a spectacular SESE known as Triclops, in Prairie Creek Redwoods State Park, California.