Ecoss ecologist Yiqi Luo and collaborators in a multi-site research team have been awarded a 6-year, $6.4 million grant from the National Science Foundation to study dryland ecosystems at the Sevilleta Long Term Ecological Research site in New Mexico. Luo and his team will be studying how the changing climate […]
The Ecological Society of America (ESA) has elected Northern Arizona University biological sciences professor Yiqi Luo as a 2018 fellow. Fellows are members of the ESA who have influenced a variety of fields, including advancement or application of ecological knowledge in academics, government, non-profit organizations and the broader society. Luo was recognized for his fundamental contributions in understanding ecosystem dynamics in response to global change and theory development in terrestrial […]
Overview Using a technique called data-assimilation, we can inform existing ecosystem models with measurements from field experiments. In combination with meta-analysis, this approach becomes a powerful statistical tool to improve our predictions of ecosystem responses to global change. We recently used data-assimilation to study the effect of warming and CO2 enrichment on […]
Overview Over the past several decades, scientists have conducted hundreds of experiments investigating responses of ecosystems to global environmental change. Ecoss synthesizes many of these responses using a statistical technique called meta-analysis. This approach considers all the measurements together and quantifies the overall response, testing whether responses vary among ecosystems, […]
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 […]
Evergreen conifer forests are the most prevalent land cover type in North America. Seasonal changes in the color of evergreen forest canopies have been documented with near-surface remote sensing, but the physiological mechanisms underlying these changes, and the implications for photosynthetic uptake, have not been fully elucidated. Here, we integrate […]
When multiple metabolic pathways lead to the same product, compound-specific isotope analysis may not provide enough information to quantify the activities of the contributing pathways. Instead, identification of where in the molecule the 13C is incorporated is required. Here we show how knowledge of position-specific 13C incorporation in fatty acids […]
New research from Northern Arizona University researchers challenges long-held assumptions that phosphorus limits aboveground plant growth mainly in tropical regions but not others. The paper, published this week in Nature Communications, suggests that this important nutrient actually helps govern plant production in temperate regions, too, and on every continent except […]
Much of what we know about where carbon will be on the globe in 12, 25 or 100 years is due to innovative predictive modeling tools like the ones researcher Yiqi Luo develops at Northern Arizona University’s Center for Ecosystem Science and Society (Ecoss). The short course taught by Luo […]
