To celebrate the end of the 2024-25 academic year, the Richardson and Carbone Labs went out for a group lunch at Delhi Palace. Although the famous lunch buffet is no longer offered, the curries and naan were amazing as always, and nobody went home hungry.
Thanks to all lab members for their efforts over the last 12 months, it’s been another great year. Best wishes to everyone for a productive but relaxing summer.
From L to R: Austin, Gena, Connor, Oscar, Mostafa, Jen, Perry, Yujie, Andrew, and Mariah (Jacob and Darby were unfortunately out of town). Note the Richardson Lab t-shirts that Oscar and Jen are sporting!
The Spruce and Peatland Responses to Changing Environments (SPRUCE) project is a whole-ecosystem warming and elevated CO2 experiment in the boreal peatland of Northern Minnesota’s Marcell Experimental Forest. The experiment has been running for 10 y (Andrew installed 10 PhenoCams at the site in August 2015), and treatments are scheduled to be turned off at the end of 2025.
In early May, project participants traveled to the Twin Cities for the final in-person SPRUCE “All-Hands Meeting,” which was packed with oral and poster presentations, and discussion groups to plan project syntheses, data-model comparisons, and final-year and post-treatment data collection. Perry was among the 26 poster presenters, and his poster detailed the phenological responses of leaves to warming observed through both PhenoCam and in-situ observations over the last 10 y. Perry also co-lead a group breakout discussion with Francisco Campos Arguedas (Kovaleski Lab, University of Wisconsin–Madison), where they posed questions related to the acute and chronic responses observed at SPRUCE (freeze events, heat waves, droughts, vs. long-term warming and elevated CO2).
After returning to NAU, Perry commented that attending the meeting had been a great experience, and though he found it intimidating at first (“I was so impressed by everyone’s research!”) he also quickly discovered that “everyone was super-nice.”
Thanks for a super job representing the lab, Perry!
In late April, Oscar, Jen, Mariah and Andrew gave a lab tour to a group of visiting students from the Southern Nevada-Northern Arizona LSAMP ( Louis Stokes Alliance for Minority Participation) program at UNLV. The group was introduced to equipment for measuring tree growth and gas exchange, as well as PhenoCams and thermal imaging.
