Bannister 110

A process-based approach to understanding ecosystem-scale variation in n-alkane δD

Normal alkanes (n-alkanes) are long-chain fatty acids that are synthesized by terrestrial plants and then accumulate in soils and sediments. Since the hydrogen in the n-alkanes is derived from the hydrogen in plants’ water sources, the stable hydrogen isotopic composition (δD) of the n-alkanes includes information about the δD of environmental water.

Can extended monitoring data provide insight into controls on post fire tree growth?

Over the past two decades, the US government has been quietly collecting data on trees in our National Parks.  The Fire Effects Monitoring Program was established to measure ongoing effects of an active prescribed fire program on tree mortality, recruitment, fuel load, understory vegetation, and more.

Bark Beetle Outbreak Reconstructions from the Spruce Forest of the Tien Shan Mountains, Kazakhstan

Schrenk’s spruce has a relatively isolated distribution in central Asia and is only distantly related to other Eurasian spruces. Its primary bark beetle is Ips hauseri, a bark beetle capable of multiple generations per year. Neither tree nor insect species are well studied, and the outbreak dynamics in Kazakhstan are unknown. In spring of 2011 high-severity wind storms devastated portions of the Tien Shan spruce forest, events known to trigger bark beetle outbreaks in spruce forests.

A new spatiotemporal field reconstruction of last millennium Northern Hemisphere summer temperatures

Climate field reconstructions allow surface temperature variability to be estimated in both space and time from proxy paleoclimate data, providing targets for general circulation model comparisons and knowledge about the fingerprint of regional-scale climate variability in response to radiative forcing and internal climate system variability. Here, we use a network of 54 temperature-sensitive tree-ring width, density, and blue intensity chronologies at high latitudes to reconstruct the Northern Hemisphere summer temperature field back to 750 CE.

Calculating the flow of energy and water in complex terrain with high performance computing (HPC): Implications for dendroecology and dendroclimatology research.

High Performance Computing (HPC) is freely available to all University of Arizona researchers. However, understanding how to develop HPC applications and workflows that go beyond current desktop computing applications are not necessarily within the purview of most earth scientists. Collaboration between computer scientists and geoscientists is now a necessity to achieve cutting edge performance and results, e.g. in the life sciences the time to sequence DNA genomes are now counted in hours instead of years because of HPC and software developed specifically for research.

How long does a 15 year drought last? On the correlation of rare events

Recent tree ring analyses of the Colorado river flows over the past 500 years enable one to characterize the fluctuations on various timescales using Fourier analysis. We model these flows and calculate the clustering properties of droughts. These results are highly pertinent to the issue of water storage in the Mead and Powell reservoirs and the necessity to rethink how we use water in the southwestern US.

MP Room Viewing by Grad College

Grad College will be viewing room in preparation for ARCS Foundation event.

Lindsey Sloat PhD Defense - Public Portion

Lindsey Sloat, EEB doctral student, will be presenting the public portion of the oral defense from 9a-10am in Bannister 110.  

Lindsey Sloat PhD Defense: Room Prep

Lindsey Sloat PhD Defense. Set up will begin at 8:30am. Public portion will be from 9am-10am.  

Climatic Changes and Their Effects on Rainfall in Hawai‘i

In the past three decades rainfall has been decreasing over many parts of the Hawaiian Islands, while temperatures have been rising. If these trends continued, severe deficit in the moisture availability could affect many parts of the Hawaiian Islands, with devastating impacts on Hawai‘i’s native ecosystem. In this presentation I will discuss how climate variability on the large-scale and rainfall variability on the small scale are related. Based on these empirical relations, statistical downscaling methods have been developed for the Hawaiian Islands.

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