Robinson Negrón-Juárez and his co-authors have now published the first study on windthrow variability, focusing on Central Amazonia. Windthrows destroy large swaths of trees, play a significant role in forest structures and dynamics, and affect carbon storage. In this study the co-authors present the seasonal and interannual variability of windthrows, and discuss the potential meteorological factors…
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The Earth and Environmental Sciences Area (EESA) recently held a townhall (Oct. 31) to preview the upcoming release of its 10-year strategic plan. Deputy Director Horst Simon, as well as Directors from other Lab Areas, joined the full house. Five Grand Challenges have been identified to drive EESA’s research over the coming decade: Earth’s Microbial…
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ESMs (Earth system models) are crucial in estimating climate sensitivity, but show large uncertainty in carbon cycle feedbacks. A key step of reducing this uncertainty is to identify the processes that govern carbon-climate and carbon-concentration feedbacks driven by changes in terrestrial carbon stocks. Are these changing carbon stocks driven by changes to inputs, or changes…
Read MoreESD’s Jill Banfield led a team that recently discovered many new groups or phyla of bacteria. The more than 35 new phyla equal in number all the plant and animal phyla combined. ESD’s Kenneth Williams was also involved in the research.
Read MoreSebastien Biraud will lead a group of scientists in an aerial campaign this summer (2015) to measure gas concentrations, aerosols, and cloud properties—to find out why current climate models underestimate how rapidly the Arctic is getting warmer.
Read MoreESD scientists Shibo Wang and Tetsu Tokunaga recently won an American Chemical Society (ACS) Editors' Choice Award for their paper on supercritical CO2-brine capillary pressure-saturation relations in limestone sands.
Read MoreA multidisciplinary team of researchers led by ESD’s Haruko Wainwright developed an ecosystem functional zonation approach to characterize the spatial variability of properties that influence carbon cycling in the Arctic – in high resolution and over landscape scales.
Read MoreCarl Steefel and Ian Bourg (and others) proved, for the first time, that anions can be completely excluded from the smallest pores within a compacted illitic clay material, indicating the effectiveness of clay-based barriers for waste containment.
Read MoreESD ecologist Neslihan Taş was one of the leading authors of a recently published paper studying the relationship between different leaf-nosed bat feeding strategies and host microbiome composition.
Read MoreEric Dubinsky was part of a team whose work, reported on in mBio (the online journal of the American Society for Microbiology), has shown the power of microbial communities to predict sources of contamination in the environment.
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