As Arctic summers warm, Earth’s northern landscapes are changing. Using satellite images to track global tundra ecosystems over decades, a team of researchers finds the region has become greener as warmer air and soil temperatures lead to increased plant growth.
“The Arctic tundra is one of the coldest biomes on Earth, and it’s also one of the most rapidly warming,” said Logan Berner, assistant research professor with Northern Arizona… Read more
Two researchers at the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society have won separate awards totaling $1.3M from the National Science Foundation to better understand where carbon is being stored and released in the terrestrial biosphere. Using different approaches, the two projects aim to better predict carbon storage by plants and soils in critical regions of the globe, and how that storage is being altered by changing climate… Read more
New research from a team including scientists of the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society (Ecoss) at Northern Arizona University suggests that subsidence—gradually sinking terrain caused by the loss of ice and soil mass in permafrost—is causing deeper thaw than previously thought and making vulnerable twice as much carbon as estimates that don’t account for this shifting ground. These findings, published this week in the
As Arctic tundra has warmed more than twice as fast as the rest of… Read more
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 for nearly 15 percent of global biomass, by some estimates—eat, store and respire carbon and other nutrients. As Earth warms, how these microbes change the way they live will have potentially big consequences for where the carbon goes.
Now, a team… Read more
Sept. 25, 2019
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 Report on the Ocean and Cryosphere in a Changing Climate (SROCC) released this week by the United Nations Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change. Ted Schuur, a researcher in the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society (Ecoss) at Northern Arizona University, was one of the lead authors on the… Read more