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 […]
The tiny cosmos of organisms living on a streamer of algae in a river—the algal microbiome—could help scientists learn what turns an environment from healthy to toxic and back again. A multidisciplinary team led by Northern Arizona University has won $3 million from the National Science Foundation to translate the […]
Earth’s ability to absorb nearly a third of human-caused carbon emissions through plants could be halved within the next two decades at the current rate of warming, according to a new study in Science Advances by researchers at Northern Arizona University (NAU) and the University of Waikato, New Zealand. Using […]
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 […]
The world’s oceans are getting hotter and acidifying under climate change at unprecedented rates, threatening coastal and high-mountain communities, marine ecosystems, and global fishing stocks, according to a new Special Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (SROCC) released this week by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel […]
The research team, led by Bradley Butterfield from NAU’s Center for Ecosystem Science and Society (Ecoss) and including Scott Anderson from the School of Earth and Sustainability, found that a plant’s evolutionary build—its growth form (tree vs. shrub) and how its seeds are dispersed—are strong predictors of how quickly it […]
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!
Ecoss graduate student Ali Martinez and a team of ecologists including her advisor Marks, Ecoss researchers Ben Koch and Zasha Welsh, Alex Flecker (Cornell University) and Steve Thomas (University of Nebraska) constructed a system of miniature streams whose temperatures Martinez can manipulate. The team studies how nutrients will move in […]
The annual peak growth of vegetation is critical in characterizing the capacity of terrestrial ecosystem productivity and shaping the seasonality of atmospheric CO2 concentrations. The recent greening of global lands suggests an increasing trend of terrestrial vegetation growth, but whether or not the peak growth has been globally enhanced still […]
Roads are a main threat to biodiversity conservation in the Amazon, in part, because roads increase access for hunters. We examine how increased landscape access by hunters may lead to cascading effects that influence the prey community and abundance of the jaguar (Panthera onca), the top Amazonian terrestrial predator. Understanding […]