Ted SchuurRegents' Professor of Ecosystem Ecology

Published by ecossuser on

Portrait of Ted Schuur
Feedback from terrestrial ecosystems to climate change, Arctic ecosystems Ted.Schuur@nau.edu
  • Google Scholar Logo
  • Research Gate Logo
Research Interests

Understanding feedbacks from terrestrial ecosystems to climate change is Schuur’s main research interest. He focuses on the response of Arctic ecosystems in a warmer world, which is key for understanding how natural ecosystems interact with human emissions to control the overall pace of climate change.
Dr. Schuur spends the summer in Alaska living in a log cabin and conducting research, surrounded by wild places under the midnight sun. What brings him here is the potential for this remote place to have an outsized influence on the shape of the future world.
In the Arctic, temperatures are rising fast as a result of burning fossil fuels and deforestation elsewhere on Earth. Warmer temperatures means that things that are normally frozen start defrosting. This includes frozen ground that contains vast quantities of organic carbon – the remains of plants and animals that have been accumulating over thousands of years.

In fact, the amount of carbon in northern soils is about four times larger than all the carbon ever emitted by human activity in modern times. Release of even a fraction of this carbon into the atmosphere amplifies the pace of climate change, making things warmer yet. As an ecosystem ecologist, Dr. Schuur is trying to discover how much frozen carbon will be released, how fast it will come out, and what the form of that carbon will be — as carbon dioxide and methane.
Answers to these questions will in part determine the future climate not only for Alaska, but for the entire world in which we live.

 

Dr. Schuur is the Principal Investigator of the following projects:
Carbon in Permafrost Experimental Heating Project
Permafrost Thaw Gradient
Permafrost Carbon Network

RCN logo

Lab Website
Full Curriculum Vitae
Selected Publications

Schuur EAG, McGuire AD, Schädel C et al. 2015. Climate change and the permafrost carbon feedback. Nature 520:171–179.

Schuur EAG, Abbott BW, and 34 co-authors of the Permafrost Carbon Network. 2011. High risk of permafrost thaw. Nature 480:32-33

Schuur EAG, Vogel JG, Crummer KG, Lee H, Sickman JO, and Osterkamp TE. 2009. The effect of permafrost thaw on old carbon loss and net carbon exchange in upland tundra. Nature 459:556-559

Schuur EAG, Bockheim J, Canadell J, Euskirchen E et al. 2008. Vulnerability of permafrost carbon to climate change: Implications for the global carbon cycle. BioScience 58:701-714

Schuur EAG, Druffel E, and Trumbore SE. (Eds.). 2016. Radiocarbon and Climate Change: Mechanisms, Applications and Laboratory Techniques. Springer, 315 pp.

Categories:

Related Posts

A CIRCUIT SHOWS HOW CLIMATE WARMING MAY ALTER DIFFERENT ECOLOGICAL LEGACIES IN THE ARCTIC BOREAL FOREST, WHICH THEN FEEDBACK INTO CLIMATE WARMING AND CHANGES TO LANDSCAPE PROCESSES.

NAU-led research team receives $9.6M to study how Alaska’s forests change, adapt to warmer future

Ecological memory stored in a landscape can help an ecosystem recover from disturbances like fire and outbreaks of disease. But what happens when climate warming disrupts that process? How long before ecological memories stored in Read more…

A SCATTERPLOT DEPICTS HOW MUCH CARBON OR OXYGEN ISOTOPE DIFFERENT SOIL BACTERIA TOOK INTO THEIR DNA (A PROXY FOR GROWTH) DURING A 7-DAY EXPERIMENT. SMALL POINTS REPRESENT THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUAL BACTERIAL STRAINS LINKED BY LINES TO THE AVERAGE GROWTH OF THEIR CLOSEST IDENTIFIED GENUS. COLORS WERE ASSIGNED BY A CLUSTERING ALGORITHM TO GROUP GENERA INTO FAST-GROWING OR SLOW-GROWING LIFESTYLES.

Lifestyles of the fast and slow (bacteria): In the wild, most live in the slow lane

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 Read more…

A trio of illustrated panels depicts the soil microbial communities in three treatments of a long-term warming experiment north of Flagstaff, Arizona. The panels are labeled in gray text, left to right: control, short-term warming, long-term warming. The control treatment, far left, depicts bacteria, protists, and other microorganisms identified by sequencing the soil’s metagenome in yellow, orange, green, and blue, along with chains of available nutrients. Soil depicted in the center panel, which has undergone short-term warming, shows an increased abundance and diversity of microbes, some of which are growing, incorporating nutrients, and respiring carbon dioxide. The soil that has undergone long-term warming, imagined in the panel on the right, shows fewer microbial species and competitive relationships that are developing for control of the scarcer nutrients.

Does a warmer future favor microbial friend or foe? Ecoss researchers win $3.4M to study interactions in changing soil

In 2002, the Odyssey probe discovered evidence of past ice on Mars. The U.S. Congress authorized the Iraq War resolution. The Anaheim Angels won the World Series. And in a meadow 15 miles north of Read more…