Fire is a primary disturbance in boreal forests and generates both positive and negative climate forcings. The influence of fire on surface albedo is a predominantly negative forcing in boreal forests, and one of the strongest overall, due to increased snow exposure in the winter and spring months. Albedo forcings […]
Ecoss postdoc Drew Peltier led a 2 hour class on tree ring science and climate change at Mangum Ranch on the North rim of the Grand Canyon. Drew joined a Grand Canyon Trust Climate change research trip, where Flagstaff High school students were helping with climate change research at the […]
Girls code. In Flagstaff, thanks to the efforts of Ecoss/SICCS postdoc and club founder Katharyn Duffy. Check out this great Arizona Daily Sun story about the new Girls Who Code club in Northern Arizona and Duffy’s plans for expanding the after-school club next year!
Ecooss is looking for a new postdoc. The postdoctoral research associate will conduct research at the interface between quantitative ecology and microbial genomics. The postdoc will use tools in bioinformatics, statistics, ecological modeling, as well as laboratory and field experiments, to develop new quantitative models describing how microorganisms grow and […]
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”
Global change models predict that high-latitude boreal forests will become increasingly susceptible to fire activity as climate warms, possibly causing a positive feedback to warming through fire-driven emissions of CO2 into the atmosphere. However, fire-climate feedbacks depend on forest regrowth and carbon (C) accumulation over the post-fire successional interval, which […]
The amount of carbon plants allocate to mycorrhizal symbionts exceeds that emitted by human activity annually. Senescent ectomycorrhizal roots represent a large input of carbon into soils, but their fate remains unknown. Here, we present the surprising result that, despite much higher nitrogen concentrations, roots colonized by ectomycorrhizal (EM) fungi […]
Forests sequester carbon from the atmosphere, helping mitigate climate change. In fire-prone forests, burn events result in direct and indirect emissions of carbon. High fire-induced tree mortality can cause a transition from a carbon sink to source, but thinning and prescribed burning can reduce fire severity and carbon loss when […]
The American Society for Microbiology awarded the 2015 FEMS-ASM Mäkelä-Cassell Award to Ember Morrissey, Ph.D. Morrissey will be presenting her latest, groundbreaking research at the Federation of European Microbiological Societies (FEMS) 6th Congress of European Microbiologists hosted this year in Maastricht, the Netherlands, on 7–11 June. Morrissey is currently a […]
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 […]