Overview Fire, a natural ecological disturbance, has been suppressed in U.S. forests for much of the past century. This has prevented damage to property and protected timber resources, but has caused many forests to develop in an unnatural manner, resulting in dense stands of small trees that are now poised […]
On January 5th, Bruce Hungate presented at Science on Tap at the Green Room, Flagstaff. Featuring an update on the Paris agreement (COP21), new science, legal intrigue, and what Elvis can teach us about climate models.
Permafrost Carbon Network
Thousands of researchers worldwide are studying how global change affects ecosystems. Using models and field experiments, they add to our understanding of this area each day. However, individual studies sometimes only tell part of the whole story. By combining results from large numbers of studies, we can discern large-scale patterns across ecosystems, and make better estimates of how global change will affect our environment. Our work on global change synthesis combines several statistical techniques with modeling approaches. (more…)
Aquatic ecosystems in the southwestern US are among the most threatened in the country: rates of species loss are high, with few remaining refuges for natives, and water extraction for human use and diversion for power generation impose major demands on the defining feature of aquatic ecosystems: water. Work at […]
Overview The identities of organisms profoundly influence ecosystems, and microbial diversity is vast. The obvious disconnect between this diversity and its treatment in C cycling models is perhaps the best manifestation of the common complaint that so much physiology, taxonomy, ecology, and diversity is ignored when microbial communities are described […]
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, […]
Overview Most global change research focuses on individual components, but the environment is changing in multiple ways simultaneously. The Jasper Ridge Global Change Experiment seeks to find out how these combined changes will affect ecosystems. Researchers tested the response of a California grassland to: climate change elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide […]
Several Ecoss members presented at the 2015 AGU fall meeting. Topics ranged from permafrost C cycle responses to climate change, to priming effects on soil C, to forest fires in the Arctic. Below you can find an overview of the presentations; click on the presentation title for more information at the AGU meeting page. […]
Congratulations to Dr. Ember Morrissey, who will begin her new job as Assistant Professor of Environmental Microbiology at West Virginia University in January 2016. Professor Morrissey will join the Division of Plant and Soil Sciences in the Davis College of Agriculture, Natural Resources & Design, where she will continue her cutting-edge […]