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Meetings and conferences are all about learning about the latest cutting-edge research, presenting one’s own work, catching up with old friends, and making new friends. It was a busy summer for the lab! 

In early July, Darby attended the annual Hubbard Brook Cooperator’s Meeting in Plymouth, New Hampshire, where she had the chance to meet other members of the Hubbard Brook LTER team, and give a presentation on her planned thesis research.  

In mid-July, Yujie and Jen attended the “Linking Optical and Energy Fluxes Workshop” held at the Mountain Research Station, Niwot Ridge, Colorado. Jen co-led a workshop on thermal imaging with long-time collaborator Chris Still, and Yujie presented a poster, “Assessing Ecological Similarity of Minimally-Overlapping Flux Footprints through Analysis of NEON AOP.” The usual photo of workshop participants was taken this time using a FLIR thermal camera (see below).

Also in mid-July, Andrew and other NEON Ambassadors co-led the 4-day virtual workshop, “Exploring NEON Derived Data Products,” which was attended by about 20 participants from a range of disciplines, career stages, and backgrounds. A paper, “Recommendations for developing, documenting, and distributing derived data products from NEON data,” is in preparation by workshop participants and organizational team. 

In early August, Natasha, Jacob, and Drew (as well as former lab postdoc Alison Post) all presented research at the ESA meeting in Portland, Oregon: Natasha gave an oral talk on her work using phenocam data to improve soil respiration modeling (bottom left); Jacob presented a poster on his RainMan research (bottom right); Drew gave an invited oral presentation on using modeling to understand mixing of old and new storage reserves in trees across a wide ecological range; and Alison gave a talk on her work to model grassland senescence.

For ecologists and earth system scientists, summer means a lot of different things—but most associate summer with field work, meetings and conferences, summer schools, and writing time. In a series of posts over the next week, we’ll look at how members of the Carbone-Richardson lab spent the summer of 2023.

Led by Christina Schädel, our new paper using data from the SPRUCE experiment, “Using long-term data from a whole ecosystem warming experiment to identify best spring and autumn phenology models,” has been published in Plant-Environment Interactions. The analysis leverages experimental warming of up to +9°C, as well as interannual variation in temperatures, to more effectively test a wide range of spring and autumn phenological models.

One of our phenocam images was chosen to appear on the cover, shown below.

PI Mariah Carbone’s $1 million proposal to the Department of Energy’s Environmental System Science (ESS) program, “Responses of plant and microbial respiration sources to changing cold-season climate drivers in the East River watershed”, was selected for funding. The project team includes Mariah, Andrew, Ben Lucas (Math & Stats, NAU), and PhD student Austin Simonpietri, as well as NCAR collaborators Adrianna Foster and Will Wieder. The research will take place at the Rocky Mountain Biological Laboratory, near Crested Butte, CO. Read the NAU Review article here.

Drew Peltier’s paper, “Carbon starvation following a decade of experimental drought consumes old reserves in Pinus edulis,” describing work he and Mariah Carbone conducted with NSF RAPID funding at the Sevilleta LTER in New Mexico, has now been published in New Phytologist. Congratulations, Drew!

At the beginning of June, Andrew and Jacob spent 3 days at the Sevilleta National Wildlife Refuge, home of the renowned SEV LTER site, installing cameras in the creosote biome plots of the MVE experiment. REU Raul Valencia helped out with the installation. Jacob, an incoming PhD student in Biological Sciences, and NAU Presidential Fellowship awardee, will be using data from these cameras, and cameras in the blue and black grama biome plots of the MVE experiment, for his thesis research. He will test hypotheses about relationships between precipitation and water availability, ecosystem productivity, and plant phenology. This work is supported by Andrew’s recent grant from NSF, DEB-2142144.

Raul Valencia, a rising senior at the University of Texas-El Paso, and summer 2023 participant in the research experience for undergraduates program at the UNM’s Sevilleta Field Station and SEV LTER Site, spent two weeks in Flagstaff in late May.

Raul worked on a variety of projects during his visit. He was trained in the use of the Flux Puppy portable CO₂ flux measurement system by Austin, visited the Flagstaff Arboretum with Oscar and helped with PhenoCam troubleshooting, and worked with Andrew on constructing instrumentation and infrastructure to be deployed in the SEV MVE precipitation manipulation experiemnt.

Raul is a non-traditional student, having already had a successful career as a mechanic and lineman. Several years ago, he realized science was his true passion and he decided to return to school for his undergraduate degree. He hopes his research experience this summer will help prepare him for graduate work in environmental science.

The picture below shows Natasha, Raul, and Austin making Flux Puppy measurements.

The Richardson Lab is committed to upholding the core values of Ecoss: Collaboration, Community, Creativity, Inclusion, Innovation, and Respect. In support of cultivating a work environment and lab culture that supports these values, lab meeting on May 3 was devoted to bystander intervention training provided through Northland Family Help Center’s “Bringing in the Bystander” workshop. Thanks to Perry for organizing this! 

On May 18, Darby, Natasha, Jacob and Andrew also participated in the Field Futures workshop on “Preventing Sexual Harassment and Assault in Fieldwork”, offered through the LTER (Long-Term Ecological Research) Network Network Office. The lab conducts field work at the Harvard Forest, Hubbard Brook, and Sevilleta LTER sites. 

There are lots of new additions to the Richardson-Carbone lab this spring! Kai Begay and Faith Kollinger are both undergraduates at CCC, and they started work in the lab in April. They’ll be improving their data analysis skills in R and Python, and working on PhenoCam-related projects for the next 12 months. They are both planning to transition to bachelor degree programs at NAU. Raul Valencia, an undergrad at UTEP, will be joining the group in mid-May. He will work for 2 weeks in Flagstaff before heading to New Mexico to participate in the Sevilleta LTER’s REU program for the summer, where he’ll work on soil CO₂ flux measurements in a precipitation manipulation experiment. Mostafa Javadian, from U of A, joins the lab as a postdoc in June and will work on thermal imaging of forest canopies.  

The paper led by Mariah Carbone, “Atmospheric radiocarbon for the period 1910-2021 recorded by annual plants” has just been published in the journal Radiocarbon. The paper draws on archived samples from NAU’s Deaver Herbarium to reconstruct a smoothed record representative of the Colorado Plateau for “bomb spike” ¹⁴C dating of recent terrestrial organic matter. The paper concludes that “archived annual plants serve as faithful scribes: samples from herbaria around the Earth may be an under-utilized resource to improve understanding of the modern carbon cycle.” Mariah was interviewed by KNAU’s Melissa Sevigny after the paper came out.