Blog

For two weeks in September, we had a visit from Johanna Kranz, a PhD student from TU Dresden. Johanna (3rd from left in the back row, below) is working on the PhenoFeedbacks project under the guidance of J. Prof. Dr. Matthias Forkel. Johanna gave a presentation in the Ecoinformatics seminar, and interacted with faculty and students across campus. She also explored many of our local scenic wonders, including Walnut Canyon, the Grand Canyon, Red Mountain, and Sunset Crater. Before leaving town, Jacob and Jen took Johanna to the Lava River Cave northwest of Flagstaff for a below-ground (non-technical) spelunking adventure. Afterwards, Johanna wrote “Visiting Andrew’s lab was a great experience meeting other PhD students and postdocs and learning more about their different areas of research. I look forward to staying in touch and collaborating in the future!” Thank you for your visit, and your kind words, Johanna!

The Logic Supply 2013 AU140 computer (pictured below) that had been the brains of our Bartlett data collection system for over 10 y was recently the subject of a blog post. Check it out!

Congratulations to SICCS T3 Fellowship and NSF GRFP awardee Natasha Wesely, who passed her Comprehensive Exam on September 13. Andrew, Mariah Carbone (Biological Sciences) and David Auty (School of Forestry, and SICCS affiliate) comprised the examination committee. A Building 7 celebration of the successful defense followed later in the day. The picture shows visiting PhD student Johanna Kranz (TU-Dresden), and lab members Mostafa, Jacob, and Natasha all arriving at the off-campus location, where they were joined by a dozen or more additional friends, colleagues, and a few random interlopers and party-crashers.

Although he couldn’t make the installation trip to California, Andrew recently assembled a solar-powered instrument package that includes a data logger, temperature and relative humidity measurements, a PhenoCam and a cell phone modem. George Koch and Drew Peltier hauled the gear to the top of an 80 m. giant Sequoia (Sequoiadendron giganteum) tree near the famed Mariposa Grove in Yosemite National Park. The installation was completed over two days in mid-September. Andrew hopes to visit the site later this autumn. Near-real-time images are available through the PhenoCam web page.

Former Post-Doc Eric Beamesderfer’s paper, “The role of surface energy fluxes in determining mixing layer heights,” has just been published in the AFM special issue on land-atmosphere interactions. Eric’s study used continuous point-based ceilometer- and radiosonde-derived measurements of MLH at surface flux tower sites to identify the surface influence on MLH dynamics. Mean MLH was the highest at all sites during the summer, while the highest annual mean MLH was found at the warm and dry sites, dominated by high sensible heat fluxes. At daily time scales, surface fluxes of sensible heat, latent heat, and vapor pressure deficit had the largest influence on afternoon MLH. These results highlight the difficulty in using single-point observations to explain MLH dynamics but should encourage the use of ceilometers or similar atmospheric measurements at surface flux sites in future studies.

The Richardson Lab hosted Mallery Quetawki, an artist and member of the Zuni pueblo who uses art as a tool to bring together Western science and traditional knowledge. Mallery gave a wonderful presentation in the Ecoinformatics Seminar titled “Communicating Environmental Health Science to Native Communities through Native-themed and Native-created Art,” which attracted the largest audience of any seminar we’ve had in the last 4 years and was a fantastic way to kick off the new semester.

One of the paintings Mallery discussed in seminar, DNA Repair, is shown below and is reproduced with Mallery’s permission. You can read more about her work on her webpage.

Jen Diehl’s late-summer BBQ has become an annual tradition and this year’s get-together was bigger and better than ever. Thanks, Jen, for the opportunity to get together with friends and colleagues at the start of the semester!

Jen Diehl, a rising G3 in the SICCS T3 program in Ecoinformatics, successfully defended her research prospectus today and advanced to the “PhD Candidate” stage. Lab members, fellow members of SICCS and Ecoss, and other random friends and colleagues all gathered at our favorite off-campus location (“Building 7”) to celebrate. Ecoss Associate Director Matt Bowker (back right) showed up to make sure things didn’t get too out of control. Congratulations, Jen!

Summer schools are a great opportunity for in-depth learning about subjects that aren’t often covered in graduate-level curricula. 

This year, Oscar participated in the 2-week “FluxCourse” (top photo) held at the Mountain Research Station, Niwot Ridge, Colorado, where he learned carbon and water flux measurements from leaves to ecosystems, and applications of remote sensing, modeling and data assimilation, to interpret, extrapolate, and scale fluxes in time and space. 

Natasha and Perry participated in the two-week “New Advances in Land Carbon Cycle Modeling” course (bottom photo), organized by collaborator Yiqi Luo, at Cornell. They learned how use process-based modeling, data assimilation, and machine learning to better understand the terrestrial carbon cycle.

Many lab members took advantage of the summer months to work on projects from the Southwest to the Northeast (and Hawaii, too).

Oscar visited his field site on Cedar Mesa, Utah, where he installed sap flow sensors, dendrometers, and a phenocam in the AmeriFlux (US-CdM) tower footprint. 

Austin traveled to the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge, New Mexico, to help REU student Raul Valencia with soil respiration measurements (see the photo below of Raul taking FluxPuppy for a walk); he also visited his own field site at the Rocky Mountain Biological Lab, near Crested Butte, CO. 

Jacob helped out with a new field installation at Sevilleta, but spent most of the summer wrapping up his undergraduate research at the RainMan experiment south of Tucson, which aims to understand the impacts of shifting precipitation patterns on Sonoran desert ecosystem functioning. We look forward to his arrival in Flagstaff later this summer!  

Darby toured our long-running AmeriFlux (US-Bar) tower site at the Bartlett Experimental Forest, New Hampshire, now in its 20th year of measurements. She also collected soil samples from the Barre Woods soil warming study and EBIS plots at Harvard Forest, Massachusetts (see the photo below of Darby extracting soil cores at Harvard Forest using a HoleHawg) for radiocarbon analysis on NAU’s MICADAS to estimate turnover times of different horizons and density fractions. 

On vacation in Hawaii, Andrew successfully got the “kamuela2” phenocam, near the Big Island town of Waimea, back online. The camera has been in operation since 2019, after the original “kamuela” phenocam was in operation from 2010 through 2018.