More severe and frequent fires in the Alaskan boreal forest are releasing vast stores of carbon and nitrogen from burned trees and soil into the atmosphere, a trend that could accelerate climate warming. But new research published this week in the journal Science shows that the deciduous trees replacing burned […]
Interviewed by STICH Scholar and Ecoss social media specialist Kayla Blair. Meet Natasha Wesely, a second year PhD student in Dr. Andrew Richardson’s lab. Natasha focuses on modeling different major ecosystem processes. One of her projects involves her creating a new soil restoration model to investigate how soil respiration is driven […]
Interviewed by STICH Scholar and Ecoss social media specialist Kayla Blair. Meet Vic Monsaint-Queeney, a PhD candidate in Bruce Hungate’s lab! Here, Vic studies bacteria in the soil on the San Francisco Peaks in Flagstaff, where she looks at the different types of nitrogen that these microbes consume. The research involves […]
Interviewed by STICH Scholar and Ecoss social media specialist Kayla Blair. Meet Jasmine Anenberg, a PhD student in the Bowker lab! This lab’s main job is to learn about and restore soil function to areas that have been degraded, by preventing erosion, stimulating nutrient cycling and productivity, or manipulating water […]
ESSTE is a unique, 3-semester internship and mentorship opportunity for undergraduate students to help prepare the next generation to address the challenge of increasing drought, fires, and floods. The ESSTE program is in response to an awareness that there is a lack of job training and placement in fields related […]
A study led by Northern Arizona University offers new evidence that a common framework to sort bacteria into two lifestyles doesn’t easily apply to bacteria living in wild soil. The findings, published in The ISME Journal, show that rather than bacteria falling into two major lifestyle groups—one adapted to be competitive and […]
The Center for Ecosystem Science and Society (Ecoss) at NAU has been named one of 15 new partner institutions of the AGU Bridge Program, which works to support students in applying to and succeeding in graduate school in the Earth sciences. Ecoss and the other new partner groups join a […]
“My dad works for the Navajo EPA, so conversation about the land, nature, and environmental work on the Navajo Nation was common in our home,” said Harvey. Her family raised horses and cattle and developed their own management plan for grazing. For an ethnobotany project in high school, she explored […]
Do dead microbes control the future of Earth’s climate? A team of researchers led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) suspects they might. Using new tools, the team can see which soil organisms are thriving and which are dying in California’s changing climate—and what happens to carbon in their cell […]
Xin Huang wants to make modeling and using big data easier for everyone, especially ecologists who don’t have extensive computer programming experience. As a third-year doctoral student in the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society at Northern Arizona University, Huang saw a technical barrier between the earth system modeling community […]