Category: Research

  • Published in PNAS: Cold season emissions dominate the Arctic tundra methane budget

    Published in PNAS: Cold season emissions dominate the Arctic tundra methane budget

    Congratulations to Donatella Zona for getting this awesome paper published in PNAS, and even getting her photo on the cover of the issue.  This resulted from our NSF grant (Zona, Oechel and Lipson) to study the year-round methane budget of the Arctic Coastal Plain. This article was written up in the Washington Post and in…

  • Rainfall Manipulation Experiment at SMER

    Rainfall Manipulation Experiment at SMER

    We are in the 4th year of an NSF-funded rainfall manipulation experiment at Santa Margarita Ecological Reserve, part of SDSU’s Field Station Program. The experiment is investigation the interactive effects of plant functional type (native shrubs vs. exotic annual species) and altered rainfall. This is a collaboration with Dr. Elsa Cleland at UCSD. Our lab…

  • Ars Bioarctica

    Ars Bioarctica

    In late winter 2016, I traveled to Finland for my sabbatical. This included a Science-Art Residency program (with the incomparable artist, Kim Reasor) at the Kilpisjärvi Biological Field Station, up in Finnish Lapland at 69 degrees north, involving the microbiology (and art!) of snow and ice. I took the snow, ice and lake water samples…

  • Elevated CO2 stimulates soil fungal diversity through increased fine root production…

    Elevated CO2 stimulates soil fungal diversity through increased fine root production…

    In collaboration with the Global Change Research Group (GCRG) and Cheryl Kuske at LANL, we studied the effects of free air CO2 enrichment (FACE) on soil fungal communities in a chaparral ecosystem. We found that elevated CO2 increased root production, which led to an increase in fungal diversity in these soils.  The results were published in Global Change…