CAP Ignite Presentations

CAP Ignites!

Who: You and your fellow CAP colleagues are invited to attend AND participate in CAP Ignite presentations and an end-of-semester celebration.

What: CAP Ignite presentations are short, 2-3 minute presentations in which you introduce your research. PowerPoint slides are optional.

Why: Our purpose is to get as many people as possible sharing their research as a means of stimulating discussion and research integration.

When: Friday, May 4th from 3-5 pm

Where: Wrigley Hall 481

Food: Of course, there will be food. And stimulating conversation.

RSVP to Marcia Nation if you intend to do a CAP Ignite presentation.

CAP Instrumental in Forwarding Urban Heat Island Research

An interdisciplinary group of CAP researchers has been instrumental in studying the Phoenix urban heat island (UHI), creating a substantial and influential body of research, which is detailed in a recent article in the Bulletin of the American Meteorological Society.
The article’s authors, CAP researchers Winston Chow and Anthony Brazel with their colleague Dean Brennan from the City of Phoenix Planning Department, note that peer-reviewed research on the Phoenix UHI (55 articles by mid-2011) significantly exceeds that on other major American metropolitan areas, such as New York, Houston, and Los Angeles. They identify three factors that have influenced the flourishing of UHI research in Phoenix: partnerships between the academy and private sector agencies, a well-developed and extensive urban meteorological station network, and strong local media coverage on the UHI. Regarding the former, the authors point to the importance of interdisciplinary research within CAP LTER in forwarding UHI research and integrating scientific and social science inquiry in urban meteorology and climatology.

What the humble authors do not mention is the significant leadership and mentoring role Anthony Brazel, a Professor Emeritus in ASU’s School of Geographical Sciences and Urban Planning and a CAP senior scientist, has played in forwarding Phoenix UHI research. He and his students have authored many of the Phoenix UHI papers.

Long-Term Research Reveals Causes and Consequences of Environmental Change

As the Long Term Ecological Research (LTER) Network enters its fourth decade, ecological scientists are taking stock of the contributions and future directions of the nation’s largest and longest running ecological research network. In a series of six papers in the April issue of the journal BioScience, teams of scientists drawn from across LTER take a critical look at the program’s 30 years of service to science and society in an era of unprecedented environmental change.

CAP scientists Nancy Grimm, Kelli Larson, and Arnim Wiek are co-authors for two of the papers. Grimm and Larson contributed to “Ecosystem Processes and Human Influences Regulate Streamflow Response to Climate Change at Long-Term Ecological Research Sites,” and Wiek was the second author on ”Scenario Studies as a Synthetic and Integrative Research Activity for Long-Term Ecological Research.”

BioScience’s retrospective look at LTER and its network of scientists, observations, and cutting-edge experiments comes at a time when public agencies and other entities charged with stewarding the nation’s environmental health are increasingly challenged to provide a sound scientific basis for their decision making. The BioScience special section demonstrates how LTER provides resource managers and policy makers the relevant information they need to address the nation’s environmental challenges and secure a more sustainable future.

For more information, please read the press release from the LTER Network Office http://bit.ly/HnE0VD . A full listing of the articles in this special section is below. Please contact the authors for copies of the papers. For copyright reasons, we cannot distribute these on our website.

Editorial
David R. Foster

Long-Term Ecological Research in a Human-Dominated World
G. Philip Robertson, Scott L. Collins, David R. Foster, Nicholas Brokaw, Hugh W. Ducklow, Ted L. Gragson, Corinna Gries, Stephen K. Hamilton, A. David McGuire, John C. Moore, Emily H. Stanley, Robert B. Waide, and Mark W. Williams

Scenario Studies as a Synthetic and Integrative Research Activity for Long-Term Ecological Research
Jonathan R. Thompson, Arnim Wiek, Frederick J. Swanson, Stephen R. Carpenter, Nancy Fresco, Teresa Hollingsworth, Thomas A. Spies, and David R. Foster

Past, Present, and Future Roles of Long-Term Experiments in the LTER Network
Alan K. Knapp, Melinda D. Smith, Sarah E. Hobbie, Scott L. Collins, Timothy J. Fahey, Gretchen J. A. Hansen, Douglas A. Landis, Kimberly J. La Pierre, Jerry M. Melillo, Timothy R. Seastedt, Gaius R. Shaver, and Jackson R. Webster

Ecosystem Processes and Human Influences Regulate Streamflow Response to Climate Change at Long-Term Ecological Research Sites
Julia A. Jones, Irena F. Creed, Kendra L. Hatcher, Robert J. Warren, Mary Beth Adams, Melinda H. Benson, Emery Boose, Warren A. Brown, John L. Campbell, Alan Covich, David W. Clow, Clifford N. Dahm, Kelly Elder, Chelcy R. Ford, Nancy B. Grimm, Donald L. Henshaw, Kelli L. Larson, Evan S. Miles, Kathleen M. Miles, Stephen D. Sebestyen, Adam T. Spargo, Asa B. Stone, James M. Vose, and Mark W. Williams

The Disappearing Cryosphere: Impacts and Ecosystem Responses to Rapid Cryosphere Loss
Andrew G. Fountain, John L. Campbell, Edward A. G. Schuur, Sharon E. Stammerjohn, Mark W. Williams, and Hugh W. Ducklow



This material is based upon work supported by the National Science Foundation under grant nos. BCS-1026865, DEB-0423704 and DEB-9714833.