Back to Minnesota for the summer

I will be returning to Minnesota this July to make high-resolution temperature response curves of respiration in the B4Warmed site at Cloquet Forestry Center. These measurements will add to the growing dataset on Tcrit and Tmax and R-T curve shape that the Atkin Lab has been accumulating - covering the TERN sites in Australia, and many other sites around the globe. Taking these measurements in warm-developed leaves at B4Warmed will allow for better predictive capacity to determine respiratory fluxes in a warmer world. I look forward to working with Kerrie Sendall, a current UMN post-doc with Peter Reich this July, who will be measuring photosynthetic fluxes across different temperatures at this site, among many other measurements. 

The B4Warmed site is distinct in its arrangement. Plant communities that are representative of the region are arranged in replicate blocks where soil and air temperatures are elevated +1.8oC and +3.6oC (and control) throughout the season, requiring an well controlled temperature modification program that links to the heating lamps and cables. These also include understory and open plots, as well as rain-removal treatments, to test the (expected) compounded impact of drought under higher temperatures. As these plants were developed under these temperature regimes, they represent future seedlings and saplings in a warmer world. 

I'm happy to return to Minnesota for the month, and look forward to working with Peter and Kerrie and their excellent field crew again. This summer and early fall, I will be employed as a post-doc by UMN working with Peter to continue manuscript preparation from my research at ANU as well as develop new manuscripts from summer research. 

In other employment news, I accepted a postdoc fellowship at the Ecosystems Center at the Marine Biological Laboratory in Woods Hole. I'm pleased to be working with Jim Tang and others for the next couple of years. My position will begin November 1, 2014, and my research will focus on phenological patterns of carbon exchange in leaves and canopies at Harvard Forest and perhaps Toolik Lake, Alaska. Very excited to be formally affiliated with the Ecosystems Center after admiring their research for so many years based on my research at the Arctic LTER as a graduate student.