Pinyon-juniper (PJ) plant communities cover a large area across North America and provide critical habitat for wildlife, biodiversity and ecosystem functions, and rich cultural resources. These communities occur across a variety of environmental gradients, disturbance regimes, structural conditions and species compositions, including three species of juniper and two species of […]
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 […]
Global terrestrial nitrogen (N) and phosphorus (P) cycles are coupled to the global carbon (C) cycle for net primary production (NPP), plant C allocation, and decomposition of soil organic matter, but N and P have distinct pathways of inputs and losses. Current C-nutrient models exhibit large uncertainties in their estimates […]
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 […]
Piling and burning is widely used to dispose of unmerchantable debris resulting from thinning in forests throughout the western United States. Quite often more piles are created than are burned in a given year, however, causing piles to persist, accumulate, and age on the landscape. The effects of burning piles […]
Land managers frequently apply vegetation removal and seeding treatments to restore ecosystem function following woody plant encroachment, invasive species spread, and wildfire. However, the long-term outcome of these treatments is unclear due to a lack of widespread monitoring. We quantified how vegetation removal (via wildfire or management) with or without […]
Congratulations to Lissy Enright (MS, Biology) for winning 3rd place overall at the 3 Minute Research Presentation Southwest regionals this past weekend at the University of Nevada, Reno! Lissy advanced to the regionals by taking 3rd and Best Slide (in collaboration with Victor Leshyk) at the NAU 3MRP competition in […]
Tree architecture is crucial to maximizing light capture, determined by carbon allocation of individual trees, and consequently characterizes species-specific growth strategies. Its variation and associated life-history strategies have been examined in tropical and temperate forests, but not in subtropical forests. Moreover, a similar architectural pattern was found using a hierarchical […]
Monitoring drought in real-time using minimal field data is a challenge for ecosystem management and conservation. Most methods require extensive data collection and in-situ calibration and accuracy is difficult to evaluate. Here, we demonstrated how the space-borne canopy “thermal stress”, defined as surface-air temperature difference, provides a reliable surrogate for […]
While we often assume tree growth?climate relationships are time-invariant, impacts of climate phenomena such as the El Niño Southern Oscillation (ENSO) and the North American Monsoon (NAM) may challenge this assumption. To test this assumption, we grouped ring widths (1900-present) in three southwestern US conifers into La Niña periods (LNP) […]