Search for: All records

Students act as environmental engineers to solve a problem using carbon dioxide (CO2) emissions from cars and wildfires. Wildfires are a timely topic because every year they cause people in many areas to face poor air quality. Students use Microsoft Excel to investigate CO2 emitted from two sources: highway traffic and forest fires. They estimate and graph the CO2 emitted by forest fires and from U.S. highway driving annually from 2004 to 2021. After they analyze these two pieces of data, they analyze a specific fire and evacuation that happened in Saratoga Springs in June 2020, named the Knolls Fire. Finally, using the Excel data and the Knolls Fire data, students decide whether the U.S. should spend money on reducing the number and severity of wildfires, or on reducing CO2 emissions from driving cars. The students design and create a poster based on their decision and present it to the class. 

Record-breaking heat waves and drought have left West Coast rivers lethally hot for salmon, literally cooked millions of mussels and clams in their shells and left forests primed to burn. The extraordinary severity of 2021’s heat and drought, and its fires and floods, has many people questioning whether climate change, fueled by human actions, is progressing even faster than studies have predicted and what that means for the future. As ecologists, we have watched climate change play out over decades at long-term research sites in forests, fields and coastal areas across the U.S. A recent series of five papers in the journal Ecosphere presents more than 25 case studies from these sites, providing a unique perspective on the changes underway and what’s likely ahead as the planet continues to warm. Here are snapshots of what we’re seeing firsthand in the National Science Foundation’s Long-Term Ecological Research Network sites, from the effect of increasing fires in Oregon’s Cascades to shifting marine life off the coast of Maine, and surprising resilience in Baltimore’s urban forests. 

Abstract Bedrock vadose zone water storage (i.e., rock moisture) dynamics are rarely observed but potentially key to understanding drought responses. Exploiting a borehole network at a Mediterranean blue oak savanna site—Rancho Venada—we document how water storage capacity in deeply weathered bedrock profiles regulates woody plant water availability and groundwater recharge. The site is in the Northern California Coast Range within steeply dipping turbidites. In a wet year (water year 2019; 647 mm of precipitation), rock moisture was quickly replenished to a characteristic storage capacity, recharging groundwater that emerged at springs to generate streamflow. In the subsequent rainless summer growing season, rock moisture was depleted by about 93 mm. In two drought years that followed (212 and 121 mm of precipitation) the total amount of rock moisture gained each winter was about 54 and 20 mm, respectively, and declines were documented exceeding these amounts, resulting in progressively lower rock moisture content. Oaks, which are rooted into bedrock, demonstrated signs of water stress in drought, including reduced transpiration rates and extremely low water potentials. In the 2020–2021 drought, precipitation did not exceed storage capacity, resulting in variable belowground water storage, increased plant water stress, and no recharge or runoff. Rock moisture deficits (rather than soil moisture deficits) explain these responses.