As climate warming stokes longer fire seasons and more severe fires in the North American boreal forest, being able to calculate how much carbon each fire burns grows more urgent. New research led by Northern Arizona University and published this week in Nature Climate Change suggests that how much carbon burns depends… Read more
Michelle Mack
NAU researchers win $1.3M in NSF grants to study major shifts in carbon storage
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 patterns.… Read more
A tale of two understories: how mosses and climate are shaping the fate of nitrogen in the boreal
Mosses and their microbial partners are important players in fertilizing the boreal forests that make up nearly a third of all Earth’s forests. But climate may be changing mosses’ role in how these forests access nutrients, according to a new study led by the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society (Ecoss) at Northern Arizona University… Read more
NAU 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… 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
Larger, more frequent fires in the boreal forest threaten previously protected carbon stores, NAU-led research team reports in Nature
Pools of old carbon in the soil of boreal forests historically safe from combustion are being released by more frequent and larger wildfires, a team led by researchers at Northern Arizona University announced in Nature this week. As the climate of these forests in the Northwest Territories of Canada becomes warmer and drier and prone to more frequent… Read more