Like a long-distance food delivery app with no apparent highway, fungi that associate with shallow-rooted shrubs in the tundra are accessing deep stores of nitrogen being released by thawing permafrost. The findings by Northern Arizona University researchers, announced this week in New Phytologist, could change scientists’ understanding of who accesses […]
Pools of old carbon in the soil of boreal forests historically safe from combustion are being released by more frequent and larger wildfires, an Ecoss team led by Xanthe Walker and Michelle Mack announced in Nature this week. As the climate of these forests in the Northwest Territories of Canada […]
The boreal forest is home to one-third of the Earth’s forest cover and stores 40 percent of the planet’s terrestrial carbon. North America’s boreal forest alone, which spans the northern portion of the continent from Alaska all the way to Newfoundland, covers an astounding 1.5 billion acres—more than 2.3 million […]
Julia Stuart, Ecoss PhD student in the Mack Lab, won an Outstanding Student Poster Award in Biogeosciences at the 2017 meeting of the American Geophysical Union, New Orleans, LA. Her poster was titled “Plant, microbiome, and biogeochemistry: Quantifying moss-associated N2 fixation in Alaska”
Professor Scott Goetz of NAU’s School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems (SICCS) is the lead principal investigator on the project, and professor Michelle Mack of NAU’s Center for Ecosystem Science and Society (Ecoss) is a co-principal investigator along with researchers from the Woods Hole Research Center and a private […]
Nitrogen isotopes in tree rings record the history of the nitrogen cycle—the critical nutrient that limits growth in many US forests. ECOSS faculty member Michelle Mack, along with colleagues from seven other institutions, recently published a paper that shows nitrogen availability in US forests declining over the past century, with […]
PhD and MS positions in Ecosystem Ecology are available in the Center for Ecosystem Science in Society (Ecoss) at Northern Arizona University. The Ecoss mission is to conduct high-impact, innovative research on ecosystems and how they respond to and shape environmental change, to train next-gen scientists, and to communicate discovery […]
Scientists who study climate and ecosystems in the Arctic have weighed in on future changes in the region affecting soils, streams and wildfire, which will be releasing greater amounts of carbon dioxide and other greenhouse gases into the atmosphere.Because the Arctic is home to billions of tons of naturally occurring carbon […]
Several Ecoss members presented at the 2015 AGU fall meeting. Topics ranged from permafrost C cycle responses to climate change, to priming effects on soil C, to forest fires in the Arctic. Below you can find an overview of the presentations; click on the presentation title for more information at the AGU meeting page. […]
Fire plays an important role in controlling structure and function in many ecosystems. Fire regimes across the globe are changing as a result of human management and climate change. Research in Ecoss seeks to understand feedbacks between fire disturbance and ecosystem structure and function in multiple contexts, from savannas in South Africa […]