Month: September 2026

This past weekend, Jacob joined a couple of other grad students to host an ECOSS booth at the 2026 Science in the Park event as part of the annual Flagstaff Festival of Science. Right in the heart of Flagstaff, this event brings together science enthusiasts ranging from kindergarteners to university faculty and everyone in between to learn about and indulge in the diversity of awesome science being done in Flagstaff. ECOSS takes part to showcase the different ecosystem ecology research projects going on within the Center. This year, Jacob taught booth visitors about the importance of studying plant phenology via PhenoCam and soil respiration via Flux Puppy. The Bartlett Experimental Forest year-long day-by-day collage was a real attention-grabber among all age groups! Science in the Park is always a highlight outreach event for the lab.

Andrew has been appointed to the Scientific Advisory Board for the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany. The term of the appointment is six years. Andrew is looking forward to future visits to Jena to see old friends and sample local specialities including Thüringer Bratwurst, Schwarzbier, Klöße, Schweinshaxe, and Aromatique, not to mention the city’s fine döner kebab!

Andrew, Mariah, and Delaney participated in the Fall 2026 Ecoss Sci-Art Show, which was organized by the inimitable Victor Leshyk, the Ecoss Center Director of Science and Art, as part of the annual Flagstaff Festival of Science. Researchers from Ecoss had the opportunity to share their research with festival-goers, using choice examples of Victor’s artwork from the vast portfolio he has assembled over the last decade. The event was well-attended by NAU faculty, students, and administrators, as well as Flagstaff and Sedona residents both young and old.

Jacob has been leveraging the parallel processing capacities and GPUs of NAU’s Monsoon HPC for his work on the impacts of changes in precipitation mean and variance on desert ecosystems. This work has involved training image segmentation models using the GRIME-AI platform and identifying dynamic changes in plant cover from tens of thousands of PhenoCam images from the Sevilleta LTER in New Mexico. In mid-September he made a Zoom presentation to the GRIME-AI Advisory Committee in which he gave a short update on how he is using GRIME AI in his work. As GRIME-AI was originally developed for hydrological applications, Jacob’s application of the tool to terrestrial ecosystem ecology was of particular interest to the Committee. Jacob deftly handled some tough questions, leaving the Committee genuinely impressed. Nicely done, Jacob!

In late June 2026, Cara and Perry (both natives of Philadelphia) attended PhysFest 5 at the University of Pennsylvania, the fifth installment of a hands-on plant physiology workshop designed to train roughly 40 grad students in key ecophysiology measurements. The workshop offered four full days of lectures and instruction on instruments related to plant water relations, thermal and hyperspectral imaging, environmental sensors, and gas exchange and fluorescence. In the final two days of the workshop, Cara and Perry teamed up with five other PhysFest attendees from Columbia, Oregon State, University of Florida, and University of Utah to craft a project idea that would be carried out in the nearby Woodlands Cemetery. Perry thought it could be interesting to use the instruments at PhysFest to assess how nighttime light pollution might affect leaf physiology. To test this, the group chose to put the Specim IQ Hyperspectral Camera and the LICOR LI-6800 gas exchange system to work in the cemetery. Given the ghostly slant to their sampling environment and the use of leaf spectral data, the group aptly named themselves the Woodlands Cemetery SPECtres. The group got to work looking for the right tree to sample, and found a beech tree with the characteristics they were looking for: one portion of the canopy directly next to a streetlight illuminated throughout the night, another portion away from the streetlight and shaded during the day, and another portion away from the streetlight but fully sunlit during the day. After collecting measurements on the three leaf types, the SPECtres found that the near-infrared (NIR) reflectance of both daytime-shaded leaves was about twice that of the sunlit leaf, but there was little difference in NIR reflectance between the daytime-shade/nighttime-lit and daytime-shade/nighttime-shade leaves. They then made photosynthetic light response curves for all leaves. As expected, the sun-adapted leaf had the highest saturation rate of CO₂ assimilation. The daytime-shade/nighttime-lit leaf, however, had the lowest assimilation rate across light conditions, and the daytime-shade/nighttime-shade had intermediate assimilation, meaning exposure to nighttime artificial light could potentially decrease photosynthetic efficiency. Each of the six groups presented their projects at the end of the course to a panel of judges (the PhysFest instructors) in founding-father-esque powdered wigs. After a long week of learning, Perry and Cara led most of the cohort on a Philly tourist sightsee and bar crawl. They felt good being back in Philadelphia and were grateful to take new skills and friendships away from it.

In early September, after a relatively wet two-week period, lab members Perry, Oscar, Yujie, and Cara (+1 for her friend Nicky, visiting from UC Davis) drove up to Schultz Pass to go foraging for lobster mushrooms. The lobster mushroom is fascinating in that it is not a single organism but rather a combination of a parasitic sac fungus (Hypomyces lactifluorum) and a host mushroom, usually a species of Russula or Lactarius. Good specimens are relatively tasty, with a firm texture and a flavor that is somewhat reminiscent of the Maine lobster, Homarus americanus. While it may not have been peak foraging season, the ‘shrooms were abundant and it was a great way to spend a beautiful Friday afternoon.

Top: The team, heading out in search of prize booty; lobster mushrooms, cooking in butter; the team, displaying their prize finds.

Two projects in which the Richardson Lab is involved have recently received some media attention, at NAU and nationally:

1. Darby’s paper, “Increasing Respiration Weakens the Carbon Sink Over Two Decades in a Temperate Deciduous Forest”, was highlighted in an NAU Review article titled “Nature’s most important climate change defenders are in peril“, and also received coverage in an article in the Concord (NH) Monitor titled “In New Hampshire, the lungs of the planet are coughing“. The paper, which documents a changing carbon cycle at Bartlett Experimental Forest since 2004, was profiled in a lab blog post a couple of weeks earlier.
2. Camelia Mosor’s work on fog in redwoods, also profiled in a blog post, was the subject of an NAU Review article titled “What AI can tell us about California redwoods and fog.”

Congratulations to Darby and Camelia!