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Global Drylands Center news

Global Drylands Center news

Global Drylands Center news

Global Drylands Center and Sala Lab looking for undergraduate research support

December 19, 2023

The Sala Lab at Arizona State University is looking for motivated undergraduate students to participate in research activities in grassland ecosystem ecology, for 10 weeks, during the summer of 2024. Successful applicants will work with peer students, faculty, graduate students, technicians, and postdocs to assist with ongoing rainfall manipulation experiments, vegetation and soil sampling, and other field surveys at the Jornada Experimental Range (~25 miles from Las Cruces, NM). Additionally, participants will have the opportunity to work with Sala Lab members and the PI to develop a personalized research project.

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Osvaldo Sala co-authors article on Australian carbon plan in Science

December 8, 2023

According to Senior Global Futures Scientist Osvaldo Sala and his co-author David Eldridge, professor in the School of Biological, Earth and Environmental Sciences at the University of New South Wales, Australia’s commitment to climate change abatement is not supported by scientific evidence, which shows that increasing — not decreasing — grazing leads to more trees and shrubs. Australia should replace efforts to reduce grazing with effective methods of sequestering carbon.

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The future of US rangelands: Choices that reshape our landscape

December 8, 2023

Despite inaccurate media portrayals of sprawling, uninhabited areas, rangelands are home to 30% of our planet’s human population and 50% of the world's livestock — making them indispensable for livelihoods and food security. However, global conversations about conservation and climate change often do not mention these landscapes.

Osvaldo Sala, Regents Professor and director of the Global Drylands Center at Arizona State University, hopes to change that.

Sala recently co-authored a paper titled "Supplying Ecosystem Services on US Rangelands" that sheds light on the potential crossroads facing these ecosystems as they are confronted with evolving environmental and societal changes. The paper was published in the research journal Nature Sustainability.

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ASU Regents Professor awarded for pioneering approach to soil restoration

December 8, 2023

Arizona State University Regents Professor Ferran Garcia-Pichel was recently awarded the 2023 Theodore M. Sperry Award from the Society for Ecological Restoration during its world congress in Darwin, Australia.

The Sperry Award acknowledges individuals or institutions who have made substantial contributions to advancing the science or techniques used in restoration practice. In this Garcia-Pichel's case, the award was bestowed “for his innovative research into the role of microbiology in ecological restoration."

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Arizona State University’s Global Drylands Center Ecologist Hire

October 10, 2023

The School of Life Sciences and the School of Sustainability at Arizona State University in collaboration with ASU’s Global Drylands Center invite applications for a full-time, tenure‐ track, benefits-eligible faculty position in the area of Drylands Ecology at the rank of Assistant or Associate Professor. Rank and tenure status will be commensurate with experience. The anticipated start date is August 16, 2024.

SOLS and SOS are engaged in education and research at all levels, while GDC integrates across academic units and fosters cutting-edge dryland ecology through use-inspired research, synthesis of novel ecological theory and education. We seek to expand a strong, diverse group of ecologists in GDC who are focused on advancing our understanding of basic and applied ecology of drylands while concurrently signaling leadership in this globally important research space. Drylands encompass 45 % of the terrestrial surface, a broad range of ecosystem types and call for a diversity of scientific approaches to attain a comprehensive understanding of their role and fate.

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Scott Collins published in Functional Ecology

September 22, 2023

In a novel approach, Scott Collins et. al. have recently published a paper in Functional Ecology on how drought and post-drought periods affect plant communities. Factors such as seed size, precipitation periods, and dominant species of certain grasslands were considered.

Read the entire paper here.

JRN Global Drylands Modeling Workshop 2023

March 21, 2023

The Global Drylands Center is hosting the JRN Global Drylands Modeling Workshop 2023. At the workshop, we will discuss the important processes needed to represent drylands in a low-dimensional (i.e., “as simple as feasible”) process-inspired model, which will mainline Jornada insights while also representing global drylands. This process-inspired model includes at least wind and water connectivity, woody-herbaceous demographics and spatial-temporal impacts of soils, climate, herbivory and other disturbances, and how these can contribute to state-changes. Learn more and view the entire workshop agenda at sala.lab.asu.edu/jrn-modeling-workshop-2023/.

BioScience Talks podcast features Osvaldo Sala

March 13, 2023

BioScience Talks podcast, hosted by James Verdier, produces a regular series entitled In Their Own Words, which chronicles the stories of scientists who have made great contributions to their fields. In their episode published on March 9, they featured Osvaldo Sala, who is the Julie A. Wrigley and Regents’ and Foundation Professor and the founding director of the Global Drylands Center as well as a Distinguished Global Futures Scientist with the Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory at ASU.

These short histories provide our readers a way to learn from and share their experiences. The results of these conversations are published in the pages of BioScience and on their podcast, BioScience Talks.

REU Opportunity! The Sala Lab seeking undergraduates for Summer 2023

January 25, 2023

About the Opportunity

The Sala Lab at Arizona State University is looking for motivated undergraduate students to participate in research activities in grassland ecosystem ecology, for 10 weeks, during the summer of 2023. Successful applicants will work with peer students, faculty, graduate students, technicians, and postdocs to assist with ongoing rainfall manipulation experiments, vegetation and soil sampling, and other field surveys at the Jornada Experimental Range (~25 miles from Las Cruces, NM). Additionally, participants will have the opportunity to work with Sala Lab members and the PI to develop a personalized research project. Students can expect to conduct field work in summer weather conditions and live on-site at the Jornada Headquarters. Successful applicants will be awarded a stipend, which is to cover food, travel, and personal project costs.

About the Jornada

The Jornada Basin Long Term Ecological Research Program is focused on the ecology of drylands in the southwest USA, including the causes and consequences of alternative ecosystem states and the expansion of woody plants into grasslands resulting in more “desert like” conditions. By conducting long-term precipitation manipulation experiments, we are interested in how long-term changes to precipitation amount and variability affect ecosystem functioning.

More information on the Sala Lab and LTER is available at:

https://sala.lab.asu.edu

https://jornada.nmsu.edu/lter

Eligibility

Undergraduate student participants supported with NSF funds in either REU Supplements or REU Sites must be U.S. citizens, U.S. nationals, or permanent residents of the United States. An undergraduate student is a student who is enrolled in a degree program (part-time or full-time) leading to a baccalaureate or associate degree.

How to apply

Applications are evaluated upon submission. Please send application materials to the Sala Lab’s Manager (e-mail: bmsutter@asu.edu) by March 12, 2023.

Application materials must include:

Cover Letter

Resume or CV

Unofficial undergraduate transcript

Post-doctoral Research Opportunity at the Sala Lab

May 20, 2022

The Global Drylands Center (GDC), the Extremes Focal Area and the Sala Lab are seeking a postdoctoral research scholar to lead two types of complementary activities. The postdoctoral research scholar will contribute to synthesis activities within the Global Drylands Center and the Extremes Focal Area in close collaboration with the Director, the Executive Committee and GDC-Extremes members. Synthesis activities will be complemented by the deployment of a field experiment at the Jornada Experimental Range in New Mexico with the objective of understanding interactions between intensity and duration of grazing and drought. The experiment will test the hypothesis that thresholds in rates of grass decline and recovery will be controlled by the interaction of defoliation amount, drought severity, and press duration.

This is a grant-funded position. Continuation is contingent on future grant funding. This position is expected to run for two consecutive years. The second-year renewal is contingent upon satisfactory progress and contribution to the collective program.

Essential duties

  1. Collaborate in the activities of the Global Drylands Center and Extremes Focal Area including synthesis, education and outreach.
  2. Design and deploy field experiment and collect data in collaboration with lab manager and graduate students.
  3. Analyze experimental data and write scientific papers associated with the research.
  4. Travel to meetings to perform the work and present results.
  5. Be an active member in research group activities (e.g., participate in lab meetings, mentor students).

Please use this link for more information and to apply: https://apply.interfolio.com/107009

Applications are due by June 12 at 3:00 p.m. AZ time.

Applications will continue to be accepted on a rolling basis for a reserve pool. Applications in the reserve pool may then be reviewed in the order in which they were received until the position is filled.

GDC Executive Committee Member Enrique Vivoni’s Latest Publication Explores Brush Management

January 6, 2022

by Celina Osuna

The Global Drylands Center wishes to congratulate Executive Committee Member Enrique R. Vivoni on his latest publication this month in Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, “A micrometeorological flux perspective on brush management in a shrub-encroached Sonoran Desert grassland,” for which he is the first author. Vivoni is a professor in the School of Earth and Space Exploration and the School of Sustainable Engineering and the Built Environment. His research focuses on water, climate and ecosystem processes and interactions with sustainability and management, with a specific emphasis on semiarid and arid regions of North America.

The article is the result of over 7 years of work studying and comparing “ecosystem responses to brush management in an herbicide-treated site to an untreated, control location to explicitly account for pre-treatment differences” in the Santa Rita Experimental Range (SRER) of the Sonoran Desert, just under 30 miles south of Tucson. Its contribution is especially important with regard to brush management strategies, which “rarely account for site differences that might occur prior to treatment.”

Below is the abstract, and you can access the full article here:

Woody plant encroachment typically limits the forage productivity of managed rangelands and alters a panoply of semiarid ecosystem processes and services. Intervention strategies to reduce woody plant abundance, collectively termed “brush management”, often lack observations to quantify and interpret changes in ecosystem processes. Furthermore, comparative studies between treated and untreated areas should account for heterogeneity since plant composition, microclimate, topoedaphic factors, and historical land use can substantially vary over short distances in drylands. Here, we quantify ecosystem responses to brush management after a single aerial herbicide application on an 18 hectare shrub-encroached grassland (savanna) in southern Arizona, USA. We conducted a pre- and post-treatment comparison of a flux tower site in the treated area with that of a tower in a nearby control site. The comparison, spanning a seven year period, included: (1) ground, airborne, and satellite-based measurements of vegetation structure, and (2) eddy covariance measurements. The herbicide treatment defoliated the dominant shrub (velvet mesquite, Prosopis velutina) and led to a temporary reduction in summer greening, but full foliar recovery occurred within two years. Contrary to expectations, perennial grass cover decreased and bare soil cover increased on the treated site. Relative amounts of evapotranspiration were reduced, while carbon uptake increased during the 2 year post-treatment period at the treated site due to a higher water use efficiency in the following spring. During mesquite recovery, carbon uptake was enhanced by higher gross primary productivity and accompanied by a decrease in ecosystem respiration relative to the untreated site. Mesquite recovery was facilitated by access to deep soil water, carbohydrate reserves in rooting systems, and a lower competition from reduced perennial grass cover. 

Scientific American takes interest in ASU drylands research

November 2, 2021

sand dunesGlobal Drylands Center’s Osvaldo Sala and Celina Osuna collaborated with Ed Finn, Director of ASU’s Center for Science and the Imagination (CSI), and co-authored a piece for Scientific American to celebrate the premiere of Dennis Villeneuve’s epic adaptation of Dune and take the opportunity to shed light on the beauty and biodiversity of the earth’s deserts in the face of common misrepresentations.

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GDC founding director appointed to NASEM Committee to advise USGCRP

October 15, 2021

In July 2021, Osvaldo Sala, founding director of the Global Drylands Center and Julie A. Wrigley Chair, Regents and Foundation Professor, was nominated by the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine (NASEM) to serve a three-year term on the Committee to Advise the U.S. Global Change Research Program (USGCRP).

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Researchers working to restore desert's vital 'biocrust'

Arizona Republic | December 15, 2020

Ferran Garcia-Pichel, a member of the Global Dryland Center's executive committee board, is one of many researchers volunteering to study and resore biocrust in the McDowell Sonoran Conservancy. This work was the focus of an article in the Arizona Republic, "How researchers hope to preserve and restore 'biocrust,' the desert's protective skin."

Biocrust stabilizes desert soil and protects it from erosion. "If there is no crust, nothing protects the soil. So with any amount of storm or wind, you'll get anything from sun devils to to big haboobs," Garcia-Pichel said in the article. Read more about biocrust and its importance in the Arizona Republic.

GDC executive board member Ferran Garcia-Pichel named Regents Professor

ASU Now | November 23, 2020

Ferran Garcia-Pichel, the Virginia M. Ullman Professor of the Environment in the School of Life Sciences, is one of four new Regents Professors at Arizona State University. Garcia-Pinchel is on the executive committee of the Global Drylands Center.

Garcia-Pichel's discoveries on the roles that microbes play in the environment are considered pioneering and transdisciplinary in his field. His research has enabled convergence of different disciplines combining approaches from biogeochemistry, geomicrobiology and global-change biology, thus opening up new frontiers of research. His research provided much of the most important knowledge of microbial ecology including the ecological and genetic diversity of the cyanobacteria, perhaps the most essential bacteria on the planet. His discoveries are shaping our understanding of the deep history of Earth from deserts to oceans. Ecological research is only beginning to come to grips with some of Garcia-Pichel's newest discoveries.

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Con Ciencia en las Américas seminar series

November 20, 2020

Watch a new Spanish language seminar series, Con Ciencia En Las Américas, organized by early-career researchers at Stanford University and the University of Santiago in Chile. The goal of Con Ciencia En Las Américas is to highlight Latin American scholars, create a broader community of scholars across the Americas, and provide Spanish language science content for a broad audience.

In this episode from October 28, 2020, Osvaldo Sala talks to Esteban Jobbágy and moderator Guadalupe Carrillo about the topic: "From forests to agricultural land: How human intervention affects the biodiversity of arid and semi-arid ecosystems."

ASU professor receives prestigious award for mentoring, interdisciplinary research

September 24, 2020

Man wearing lab coat looks into microscopeFerran Garcia-Pichel, Arizona State University professor and researcher, has been awarded the 2021 D.C. White Award by the American Society for Microbiology.

The American Society for Microbiology is one of the largest professional societies dedicated to the life sciences and is composed of 30,000 scientists and health practitioners.

The award recognizes distinguished accomplishments in both interdisciplinary research and mentoring. It was created in honor of David C. White, a well-known microbial ecologist widely recognized as a leader in interdisciplinary science, and for his dedicated and inspiring work as a mentor and teacher.

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New study shows soil as significant carbon sequestration driver

ASU Now | September 17, 2020

rich soil with single sprout illuminated in sunlightAs harmful atmospheric carbon dioxide levels continue to increase, understanding the planetary carbon balance has become the single most important scientific question.

A new report by two leading ecological scientists at Arizona State University quantified the global soil carbon sequestered by roots plus the amount leached into the soil. They revealed that climate and land-use are major influencers of belowground carbon sequestration. The study, “Global patterns and climatic controls of belowground net carbon fixation,” also found that the amount of carbon sequestered belowground changes with precipitation but its effect varies among large vegetation types.

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Vegetation shifts can outweigh climate change in desert rangelands

ASU Now | May 18, 2020

Grasslands across the globe, which support the majority of the world’s grazing animals, have been transitioning to shrub lands in a process that scientists call “woody plant encroachment.”

Managed grazing of drylands is the most extensive form of land use on the planet, which has led to widespread efforts to reverse this trend and restore grass cover.

Until now, researchers have thought that because woody plants like trees and shrubs have deeper roots than grass, woody plant encroachment resulted in less water entering streams and groundwater aquifers. This was because scientists typically studied the effect the grassland shift toward shrubs has on water resources on flat ground.

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