The global environment is changing. Climate change, species invasions, and land use all affect Earth’s natural ecosystems and how they function. Changes in ecosystems also affect the global environment. At Ecoss, our work asks, how do ecosystems respond to environmental change and how do those responses shape the environment?
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 Flagstaff, scientists began to monitor and move small plots of soil along a mountain gradient Read more…
By the end of this century, permafrost in the rapidly warming Arctic will likely emit as much carbon dioxide and methane into the atmosphere as a large industrial nation, and potentially more than the U.S. has emitted since the start of the industrial revolution. But that’s only one possible future Read more…
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 Read more…
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, Read more…
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 Read more…
Fire plays an important role in controlling structure and function in many ecosystems. Fire regimes across the globe are changing as a result of human management and climate change. Research in Ecoss seeks to understand feedbacks between fire disturbance and ecosystem structure and function in multiple contexts, from savannas in South Africa Read more…
Early morning at the Carbon in Permafrost Experimental Heating Project (CiPEHR) in Alaska
Global change affects plants and soil in ecosystems across the globe. By doing so, it can alter the composition of ecosystems and the functions they provide. For instance, even small changes in plant growth and soil properties can have a large impact on the amount of CO2 and other greenhouse gases in the atmosphere. At Ecoss, we use field experiments to manipulate the temperature, rainfall and other environmental factors in various ecosystems. This allows us to mimic future conditions, and helps us understand how future ecosystems will differ from the ones today. (more…)
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…)