Fatemeh Afghah, an associate professor in the School of Informatics, Computing, and Cyber Systems (SICCS) at Northern Arizona University, has received a $550,000 grant through the National Science Foundation’s (NSF) Faculty Early Career Development (CAREER) Program, one of the foundation’s most prestigious awards. The funding will support a project developing algorithms that will enable a fleet of smart and autonomous drones to assess situations, change… Read more
environment
Fallowing cattle-feed farmland simplest way to alleviate western water shortage, FEWSION-based study finds
Depletion of river flow across the US during summer months. The 17 western states experience much higher levels of depletion during July to September than eastern states, owing to lesser precipitation and greater use of irrigation in the western states. a, Summer depletion during the 2001–2015 model simulation. b, Summer depletion in the driest 10% of… Read moreNAU scientists help chart a path to understand how Arctic vegetation is changing
As Arctic tundra has warmed more than twice as fast as the rest of the planet in… Read more
NAU scientists, national partners win $3.3 million to study microbes’ role in a changing world
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 led… Read more
NAU scientist maps CO2 emissions for entire Los Angeles Megacity to help improve environmental policymaking
As the threat of global warming grows—and with it, the specter of more extreme conditions such as wildfires, droughts and tropical storms—cities across the U.S. are developing policies to reduce their emissions of greenhouse gases, chiefly carbon dioxide (CO2). Even though many local governments are committed to these goals, however, the emissions data they have to… Read more
How do new traits emerge? NAU researcher working to answer one of evolutionary biology’s most challenging questions
Evolutionary biologists have long puzzled over how new traits emerge in nature, largely because much of the evolutionary information available is from the distant past. To learn more about how genes influence evolution, these researchers study organism phenotypes—the observable characteristics of an organism that are influenced by genetics and environment—and… Read more