ECOSs – Blog Articles

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…

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…

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…

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.…

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…

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…

As the Arctic endures another summer of record-breaking surface air temperatures, a team from NAU, led by Ecoss’ assistant research professor Christina Schädel, has been awarded a three-year, $764,000 grant…

On a recent weekday morning, I logged on to a zoom session of Mrs. Mathew’s summer science class at Greyhills Academy High School in Tuba City. A picture of two…

Drought—even in a single year—can leave aspen more vulnerable to insect infestation and other stressors decades later, a new study by NAU researchers found. Aspen trees that were not resilient…

Predatory bacteria—bacteria that eat other bacteria—grow faster and consume more resources than non-predators in the same soil, according to a new study out this week from Northern Arizona University. These…

More severe and frequent fires in the Alaskan boreal forest are releasing vast stores of carbon and nitrogen from burned trees and soil into the atmosphere, a trend that could…

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…

Many Ecoss researchers are presenting at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union taking place online Dec 1-17. Everyone who is registered for the meeting can join live online…

In a year in which global temperature and atmospheric carbon dioxide records were broken, experts from 20 colleges and universities will gather virtually November 17-19, 2020 at Northern Arizona University…

Many Ecoss students, staff and faculty are presenting at this year’s virtual Ecological Society of America meeting, held Aug. 3 – 6, 2020. Learn where to view their presentations and…

Warming global temperatures are changing life on every continent on Earth, including Antarctica, where more microbes are moving in to territory previously covered by ice. How these microbes respond to…

New research from Northern Arizona University researchers challenges long-held assumptions that phosphorus limits aboveground plant growth mainly in tropical regions but not others. The paper, published this week in Nature…

Stephen Porder from Brown University will talk about how to move universities off of fossil fuels.

The abrupt thawing of permafrost may affect up to half of all carbon stored in the layer of frozen Arctic soil, according to a new study in Nature Geoscience, and…

If the fate of carbon is a test that planet Earth is taking right now, one of the answer keys is likely to be found in soil, where microorganisms—which account…

Like a long-distance food delivery app with no apparent highway, fungi that associate with shallow-rooted shrubs in the tundra are accessing deep stores of nitrogen being released by thawing permafrost.…

Use this guide to find where Ecoss scientists will be presenting at the annual fall meeting of the American Geophysical Union (AGU) in San Francisco, Dec. 9 – 13, 2019.…

NAU joins with ASU, UA and Arizona communities to confront climate crisis As Arizona confronts the impacts of a hotter world, Northern Arizona University is joining partners from Arizona State…

Wired red oak is first of its kind in North America. As trees across the U.S. continue their picturesque march toward autumn, one 100-year-old oak tree in Massachusetts is attracting…

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…

The world’s oceans are getting hotter and acidifying under climate change at unprecedented rates, threatening coastal and high-mountain communities, marine ecosystems, and global fishing stocks, according to a new Special…

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…

Ecoss’ Bruce Hungate and Victor Leshyk co-authored a study on the “CO2 fertilization effect”. The study was led by César Terrer and Rob Jackson and published in Nature Climate Change.…

The research team, led by Bradley Butterfield from NAU’s Center for Ecosystem Science and Society (Ecoss) and including Scott Anderson from the School of Earth and Sustainability, found that a…

Ecoss researchers show that more carbon is being released from thawed permafrost than previously thought. A new paper published this month in Nature Geoscience introduces a new way to track…

Much of what we know about where carbon will be on the globe in 12, 25 or 100 years is due to innovative predictive modeling tools like the ones researcher…

Girls code. In Flagstaff, thanks to the efforts of Ecoss/SICCS postdoc and club founder Katharyn Duffy. Check out this great Arizona Daily Sun story about the new Girls Who Code…

“Today I am taking the flux puppy for a walk at @HarvardForest to measure stem respiration,” NAU postdoctoral researcher Tim Rademacher recently tweeted. With it, a photo of a small…

Fossil Creek Restoration Can we restore a river after a century of disturbance? Research in the Marks Lab has addressed the following questions: How did native species respond to restoration?…

Ecoss studies the interactions of plants with their physical and biotic environments at a fundamental level common to all organisms: gas exchange, energy balance, and water relations. We explore how…

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…

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…

Soil microorganisms are biogeochemical forces of global significance. They affect nutrient availability to plants, the amount of carbon stored in soils, and the evolution of the atmosphere over geologic time.…

As part of a large interdisciplinary team, with funding from the National Science Foundation, we have studied how genetic and environmental factors affect leaf litter quality in cottonwoods and other…

Invasive plants like cheatgrass have huge and costly effects on ecosystems. Restoring native plants to areas invaded by cheatgrass is challenging, and one explanation for poor seedling establishment is the…

We’ve got your number: Tracing the source of invasive Japanese beetles March 9, 2016 Sonya Daw news.nau.edu Like a Southern drawl popping up on the West Coast, our accents mark…

Soil is a complex ecosystem with diverse microenvironments ranging from bulk soil with low quality substrates and no or very limited microbial growth, to high quality C-rich environments near decomposing…

When new carbon enters soil, especially carbon that is easily assimilated and decomposed by soil microorganisms, a chain reaction occurs leading to the breakdown of older soil carbon, carbon that…

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…

Heat waves in Arizona: Do microbial symbionts buffer the effects of heat waves?

We study soil microbial communities in Antarctica, microbes in hot spring ecosystems in Tengchong, China, methane production at Axel Heiberg Island near Greenland as an analog for life on other…

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…

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…

Antibiotic-resistant bacteria are widespread and are increasingly associated with human infections.  Inappropriate antibiotic use – both in people and in animals raised for food – drives the evolution of multi-drug-resistant pathogens and threatens…

  Permafrost, the “always-frozen” deep soil layers of the Arctic, naturally undergoes freeze-thaw cycles with the passage of the brief Arctic spring and summer, which thaws the uppermost layers and…

Biochar, a fine-grained carbon residue of charred plant material, has recently been promoted as a universal amendment to soil to improve moisture and nutrient content with the expectation of higher…

Ecoss research demonstrated that grasslands with more diverse plant species pull down and store more carbon per acre: in this illustration, the same plot of soil from a diverse vs.…

In a groundbreaking study, Ecoss research produced a monetary value for biodiversity by demonstrating that having more diverse plant species enables a grassland to draw down and store more carbon.…

Measuring the growth rates of individual bacteria taxa within a mixed sample gives a powerful view of the moving parts of a living ecosystem, especially when that sample is soil,…

Native soil carbon (C) can be lost in response to fresh C inputs, via the “priming effect,” a phenomenon observed for decades yet still not understood. Using dual-stable isotope probing,…

The mass emergence of metamorphosed aquatic insect larvae as airborne adults provides an important seasonal pulse of prey biomass to many aquatic ecosystems.  Ecoss research explored whether the type and…

Pollution scenarios and anthropogenic warming are familiar examples of human-caused stress on the environment.  But human-driven loss of biodiversity itself robs ecosystems of essential players and services, damaging ecosystem function.…

Rising global temperatures and CO2 levels are increasing the amount of global-warming methane (the flaming red molecule depicted here) produced by rice farming: with more CO2 in the air to…

Researchers at Ecoss helped to uncover a potent offset to carbon “drawdown” by plants:  with more CO2 available to fuel photosynthesis in the air above, soil microbes consume more sugars…

Albedo, the reflectance of sunlight from earth’s surface, is an important moderator of climate because it determines whether solar energy is locally absorbed or re-radiated to space.  Ecoss-associated research characterized…

Management of forests for carbon uptake is an important tool in the effort to slow the increase in atmospheric CO2 and global warming. However, some current policies governing forest carbon…

Longstanding land-management policies of complete wildfire suppression on wild lands were intended to prevent catastrophic wildfires through constant human monitoring and intervention.  However, when combined with policies that prohibit logging…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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…