The Oregon Labor Day fires of 2020 collectively burned over 1,000,000 acres. That year, more than 10,000,000 acres burned across the western US that caused nearly $20 billion dollars in damages. This study is focused on the post-fire effects on a young industrial timber plantation that we were monitoring very carefully for years prior as part of another project, but it burned up in the Holiday Farm Fire.
Soil carbon "sequestration" is all the rage now a days, but very rarely does anyone define the time-frame of "sequester". Usually folks are only looking at changes to soil carbon *content*, and assuming those changes are permanent. They are not. Here we show that soil carbon *content* is de-coupled from how long that soil carbon stays in soil (i.e. having more carbon in soils does not necessary mean that carbon sticks around for longer periods of time).
I successfully defended my PhD, and had a lot of [type II] fun in the process. You can watch my presentation, look through my slides, and access my *draft* dissertation that still requires more edits before it's finalized. Enjoy.
The NEON project was at its infancy when I began my dissertation. They were literally building and installing the ~30 sites around North America at the same time they were sampling soils for my project. Although my PhD focuses on the soils aspect, there is a wealth of publicly available data being generated that any scientist should be aware of.
Ever wanted to see how perfectly square a 1x1x1 meter cube you could dig? Well neither have I! But it turns out, ecosystem-level carbon accounting require very precise partitioning of biomass pools to be effective.
Forest management has strong effects on the landscapes, but what happens to soil carbon - and therefore site productivity - following intensive biomass harvesting?
Chicken or the egg. Grassland soil carbon behaves different than forest soil carbon. But is that because of the plant composition? (No). Or is it because of the climatic differences? (Probably) But if the climatic differences *also* lead to vegetation differences, then how can you separate out the climate from the vegetation? Here we attempt to do so.
Studying wildfire effects on ecosystems is difficult because predicting *where* and *when* something will burn is nearly impossible, and rarely do you have robust pre-fire data. My dissertation samples from the Great Smoky Mountain National Park were collected prior to the Chimney Tops 2 from 2016. It was a wind-driven high intensity and high severity fire that burned 4,500 hectares. In this paper, we examine the pre and post fire pyrogenic carbon signal using an innovative BPCA method developed by Dr. Matosziuk.
The National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) integrates hard infrastructure along with cloud-based data products that are publicly available. In this paper we advertised just *some* of the capabilities that NEON currently has, and describe how other site-specific instruments/observations may be incorporated.
Growing trees can take a whole lifetime, so you better know if your site nutrition status changes following harvest. Here we looked at a few sites in the PNW to examine how the antecedent conditions helped to buffer the soils to changes to the nutrient capacity of the site.