Antibiotic resistance and public health: it’s an emergency
Press Coverage: The NAU Review • Date: Dec 26, 2024. (Coverage of Koch et al. 2024 in Communications Medicine.) NAU Review Publication: https://www.nature.com/articles/s43856-024-00693-7
Climate and the Arctic
Press Coverage: The NAU Review • Date: Feb 6, 2025. (Context for the Science special collection on the Arctic; quotes Regents’ Prof. Ted Schuur.) NAU Review Publication: https://www.science.org/doi/abs/10.1126
Salmon’s Secret Superfood discovered through ecosystem science
In the Eel River, the symbiotic triad of the green macroalga Cladophora, its Epithemia epiphytes, and the diazoplasts within Epithemia are embedded in a complex food web with thousands of other algal and bacterial species. Despite high species richness of photoautotrophs and N-fixing bacteria at the base of this food web, much of the N Read more…
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 the warming Arctic are overwritten by new ones, and what does that mean for the Read more…
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 that rather than bacteria falling into two major lifestyle groups—one adapted to be competitive and Read more…
A bridge to stronger, more diverse Earth sciences
The Center for Ecosystem Science and Society (Ecoss) at NAU has been named one of 15 new partner institutions of the AGU Bridge Program, which works to support students in applying to and succeeding in graduate school in the Earth sciences. Ecoss and the other new partner groups join a Read more…
Decoding biological mysteries with algae: NAU team wins $3M from NSF to model microbiome
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 Read more…
Relevant, dead, or both?: Team wins $15M from Department of Energy to study how microbes’ traits are linked to carbon storage
Do dead microbes control the future of Earth’s climate? A team of researchers led by Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) suspects they might. Using new tools, the team can see which soil organisms are thriving and which are dying in California’s changing climate—and what happens to carbon in their cell Read more…
What the future looks like: NAU student creates tool to make modeling easier for ecologists
Xin Huang wants to make modeling and using big data easier for everyone, especially ecologists who don’t have extensive computer programming experience. As a third-year doctoral student in the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society at Northern Arizona University, Huang saw a technical barrier between the earth system modeling community Read more…
Earth to reach temperature tipping point in next 20 to 30 years, new NAU study finds
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 Read more…