Already in Arizona to visit colleagues in Tucson, Brazilian forest engineer Izabela Aleixo, newly hired as a researcher at the National Institute for Amazonian Research (INPA), traveled to Flagstaff in early October. She presented her research in a seminar titled “Tropical Forests and Environmental Change: Insights from Long-Term Phenology and Large-Scale Experiments in the Central Amazon.” Izabela’s work focuses on tree phenology, mortality, and forest dynamics in relation to climate change, and recently she is participating in several large-scale experiments. In her talk, Izabela showed exciting preliminary data from the AmazonFACE experiment. These results provide early evidence of the potential effects of elevated CO₂ on plant physiology and forest functioning. The full-scale experiment is still being installed.
During her brief visit, Izabela had dinner with students at Delhi Palace, enjoyed a happy hour at Mother Road, saw the impressively shiny MICADAS AMS for radiocarbon analysis, and visited Sunset Crater.
