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 […]
The Arctic continues to warm at a rate that is currently twice as fast as the global average (see essay on Surface Air Temperature). Warming is causing normally frozen ground (permafrost) to thaw, exposing significant quantities of organic soil carbon to decomposition by soil microbes (Romanovsky et al. 2010, Romanovsky […]
Recent observations suggest that permafrost thaw may create two completely different soil environments: aerobic in relatively well-drained uplands and anaerobic in poorly drained wetlands. The soil oxygen availability will dictate the rate of permafrost carbon release as carbon dioxide (CO2) and as methane (CH4), and the overall effects of these […]
Ecosystem respiration (Reco) is one of the largest terrestrial carbon (C) fluxes. The effect of climate change on Reco depends on the responses of its autotrophic and heterotrophic components. How autotrophic and heterotrophic respiration sources respond to climate change is especially important in ecosystems underlain by permafrost. Permafrost ecosystems contain […]