News

Dr. Goetz shares his excitement about GEDI and the research it will inspire in a new interview with NASA:

After many years of preparation – over a decade – we are on the cusp of having a space-borne lidar instrument that is designed for land research and applications …

When GEDI achieves orbit and the data from the instrument reach the science community, I think we will see a revolution in research and applications related to ecosystem dynamics, including forestry, biodiversity and hydrology …

GEDI is long overdue. I can hardly wait to see what we can do with the unique data it will provide.  At long last we will have access to the 3rd dimension of global forests!

Read more about what Dr. Goetz had to say about GEDI, as well as interviews with other GEDI scientists here.

Animals play a significant role in shaping landscape scale carbon exchange and storage, according to new research published in Science by Dr. Goetz and NAU colleague Dr. Chris Doughty.  Goetz and Doughty used remote sensing to analyze animal movements and how they impact the global carbon cycle.  Their research highlights the importance of including animal feedbacks in discussions of climate change mitigation.

Read more about this research here, and read the full article here.

 

Credit: Idrose/flickr

Scott Goetz and NAU Center for Ecosystem Science and Society (ECOSS) researcher Ted Schuur were recently featured in a Science Magazine article highlighting permafrost research conducted under NASA’s ABoVE project.  Schuur’s experimental field studies measure how much carbon is released to the atmosphere due to permafrost thaw.  This work has now gained an airborne ally.  NASA aircraft capable of mapping topography and emitting radar pulses that penetrate the ground surface and measure depth to permafrost are now flying missions in conjunction with field-based permafrost studies.  These flights will help link field based measurements to remote sensing data and scale these fine scale measurements up to larger spatial scales.

Read more about this project here.  Read more about “drunken trees” here.

Scott Goetz recently collaborated with researchers Xanthe Walker, Michelle Mack and Ted Schuur from NAU’s Center for Ecosystem Science and Society (ECOSS) on a study estimating carbon emissions from an unprecedentedly large fire in Canada’s Northwest Territories (NWT). Accurate predictions of carbon emissions are necessary to predict future climate feedbacks.  This study examined the major sources of heterogeneity that impact carbon emissions at different scales.  This increased understanding can be used to improve high resolution modeling of carbon emissions across understudied areas.

Read more about this study here, and read the full article in Global Change Biology here.

Scott Goetz, along with NAU Center for Ecosystem Science and Society (ECOSS) professor Michelle Mack, are leading a new Department of Defense (DoD) funded project to to assess the resiliency and vulnerability of boreal forest on DoD lands across central Alaska.  This project is just one example of many collaborations between the GEODE lab and ECOSS.

Read more about this project here.

Scott Goetz and Logan Berner are co-authors on “Plant functional trait change across a warming tundra biome,” a paper out this year in Nature.

Goetz and Berner collaborated with scientists from institutions across the world to assess climate impacts on plant functional traits across the tundra biome and three decades of climate warming.

Read more via NAU’s In the Spotlight and read the full paper here.