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2009 Science Spotlights
"Science Spotlights" are examples of INSTAAR research, education, and societal outreach.
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DIANE MCKNIGHT ELECTED AAAS FELLOW FOR 2009 Diane McKnight is one of three CU-Boulder faculty members who have been elected fellows of the American Association for the Advancement of Science for 2009. McKnight was honored for her outstanding contributions to coupled biogochemical and hydrologic processes. The three new AAAS fellows were among 531 AAAS fellows elected by their peers for efforts to advance science or foster applications deemed scientifically or socially distinguished. Founded in 1848, AAAS works to advance science for human well-being through its projects, programs and publications in the areas of science policy, science education and international scientific cooperation. AAAS includes 262 affiliated societies and academies of science serving 10 million individuals and publishes the journal Science.
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PORTIONS OF ARCTIC COASTLINE ERODING, NO END IN SIGHT Robert Anderson, Irina Overeem, Gary Clow, and colleagues have found that the northern coastline of Alaska midway between Point Barrow and Prudhoe Bay is eroding by 30 to 45 feet a year because of a "triple whammy" of declining sea ice, warming seawater and increased wave activity. The 12-foot-high bluffs in this region consist of frozen blocks of silt and peat containing 50 to 80 percent ice. During the summer months, the bluffs topple into the Beaufort Sea as waves deliver warm seawater to melt a notch that undermines their base. Once the blocks have fallen, the coastal seawater melts them in a matter of days, sweeping the silty material out to sea. The team monitored the dynamic transition between the land and the sea through the use of time-lapse photography of shoreline erosion, global positioning system mapping (GPS), meteorological measurements including temperature and wind speed, and sediment analyses of the coastal bluffs. Offshore measurements included sea-ice distribution, ocean floor depth, sea-surface temperatures and wave dynamics. While there are no towns adjacent to the specific study area, coastal erosion threatens abandoned military and petroleum infrastructure nearby and occurs at similar sites elsewhere along Alaska's coastline. Bank stabilization measures using sandbags, for example, have been undertaken at the Alaskan town of Kaktovik on the Beaufort Sea in an attempt to slow the erosion. See the links to the right to view a video featuring Anderson and time-lapse photography of the eroding coastline. The team's results were presented in a series of talks and posters at the annual meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco held Dec. 14-18. Anderson also presented the research findings at a news conference addressing the impact of climate change on the Arctic. Image: Irina Overeem standing near Drew Point, northern Alaska. Photo: Robert Anderson (INSTAAR and Geological Sciences, CU-Boulder).
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ARCTIC LAKE SEDIMENT RECORD SHOWS WARMING, UNIQUE ECOLOGICAL CHANGES IN RECENT DECADES A team of researchers from five universities, led by Yarrow Axford, discovered that biological and chemical changes occurring at a remote Arctic lake in recent decades are unprecedented over the past 200,000 years and likely are the result of human-caused climate change. The team's study is based on uniquely old sediment cores extracted from the bottom of a lake on eastern Baffin Island, which is several hundred miles west of Greenland. The research team carefully sampled the sediments for indicators of past environmental change: algae, insects and geochemistry. And they constrained the age of the core through radiocarbon and optically- stimulated luminescence dating. Their record of past environments goes back in time 80,000 years before the oldest reliable ice cores from Greenland and captures three interglacial periods, including the Holocene. Although the lake was overridden by glacier ice several times, the interglacial sediments were not eroded. Environmental changes during all three interglacial periods have been tightly linked to natural causes of climate change -- including periodic, well-understood wobbles in Earth's orbit. But changes seen in the sediment cores since about 1950 show that expected natural climate cooling, and related changes in the lake environment are being overridden by human activity like greenhouse gas emissions. Team members included Jason Briner (former INSTAAR, now Univ. at Buffalo), Gifford Miller, and Alexander Wolfe (former INSTAAR post doc, now Univ. of Alberta). Their paper was the cover story for the November 3rd volume of the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences of the USA (PNAS). Image: Collecting lake sediment cores on Baffin Island, Canada.. Photo: Jason Briner (University at Buffalo).
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JAMES SYVITSKI TO RECEIVE THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF CANADA'S A.G. HUNTSMAN MEDAL James Syvitski has been awarded one of the top honors in Oceanography, the Royal Society of Canada's A.G. Huntsman Medal, as presented by the President of the Academy of Science. The award honours marine scientists of any nationality who have had and continue to have a significant influence on the course of marine scientific thought. It is presented annually in one of three categories: marine geosciences, physical/chemical oceanography, and biological/fisheries oceanography. As the 2009 recipient, Syvitski is recognized for his contributions to marine geoscience. Previous awardees include Edouard Bard, Edward Boyle, Nicholas Shackleton, Wallace Broecker and others. The award was established by the Bedford Institute of Oceanography to honour the memory of Professor Syvitski's scientific interests are broad and include fjords, rivers, deltas, estuaries, particle dynamics, simulation of sediment transport and stratigraphy, continental margin sedimentation, gravity flows, and animal-sediment interactions. Professor Syvitski received his Ph.D. from the University of British Columbia in 1978 and was a member of the Geological Survey of Canada (Atlantic) from 1981 to 1995. In 1995 he became Director of the Institute of Alpine and Arctic Research at the University of Colorado. Professor Syvitski has held various academic appointments at the University of Colorado and since 2007 has been Executive Director of the Community Surface Dynamics Modelling System (CSDMS). The award ceremony will take place at the Bedford Institute of Oceanography on Thursday, November 12, 2009.
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WORLD'S RIVER DELTAS SINKING DUE TO HUMAN ACTIVITY James Syvitski, Albert Kettner, Irina Overeem, Eric Hutton and Mark Hannon, along with colleagues from six other institutions, have shown that most of the world's low-lying river deltas are sinking from human activity, making them increasingly vulnerable to flooding from rivers and ocean storms and putting tens of millions of people at risk. The authors first chose 33 major deltas to represent those of the world. For each delta, the team then carefully examined high-resolution satellite images, Shuttle radar topopography, historical maps, river sediment load records, and sea level data. They found that 24 out of the world's 33 major deltas are sinking and that 85 percent experienced severe flooding in recent years. While the 2007 Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change report concluded many river deltas are at risk from sea level rise, the new study indicates other human factors are causing deltas to sink significantly. The researchers discovered that the sinking of deltas from Asia and India to the Americas is exacerbated by the upstream trapping of sediments by reservoirs and dams, man-made channels and levees that whisk sediment into the oceans beyond coastal floodplains, and the accelerated compacting of floodplain sediment caused by the extraction of groundwater and natural gas. Published in the Sept. 20 issue of Nature Geoscience, the study was led by James Syvitski, who is directing a $4.2 million effort funded by the National Science Foundation to model large-scale global processes on Earth like erosion and flooding. Known as the Community Surface Dynamic Modeling System, or CSDMS, the effort involves hundreds of scientists from dozens of federal labs and universities around the nation. Image: Image of part of the Pearl River Delta in China taken by NASA’s space shuttle Endeavour during the Shuttle Radar Topography Mission in 2000. The areas below sea level are shown in purple. Image courtesy NASA, CSDMS, University of Colorado.
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NEW SOLAR PANELS POWER WORK AT THE MOUNTAIN RESEARCH STATION Steve Seibold and Kathy Clegg have led an effort to install multiple solar panel arrays at INSTAAR's Mountain Research Station (MRS). The pair recently helped secure $75,000 of support through a successful proposal to the CU-Boulder Student Union (UCSU), submitted by the CU-Boulder Biology Club. The award leverages energy incentives already in place in Colorado and is expected to fund 20 kilowatts of energy creation - or about 30 percent of the station's total electricity load. The first phase of installation is underway. Panels equivalent to 10 killowatts of power are being attached to the roof of the Marr Alpine Laboratory on the MRS campus, which is located about 15 miles northwest of Boulder at 9,500 ft (2895 m). The Marr Lab supports many studies of global warming and climate change. Its new array will not only help power regular activities, but will also provide invaluable backup power when extreme winds and snow disrupt power delivered by cable. The second phase of installation will be a ground-mounted array at the C1 research site. As part of the funding agreement, savings in electric bills will help fund new student scholarships for classes at the Station. The new panels will not only save money and cut carbon emissions, but help put the Mountain Research Station on track to become CU's first net-zero "campus". Image: Marr Alpine Laborary, showing part of its new solar panel array. Photo: K. Clegg (INSTAAR).
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RECENT WARMING REVERSES LONG-TERM ARCTIC COOLING An international team of scientists - led by Darrell Kaufman (former INSTAAR, Northern Arizona Univ) and including Gifford Miller - reconstructed past climate in the Arctic over the past 2,000 years in unprecedented detail. The team found that Arctic temperatures have reversed from a long-term cooling trend and are now the warmest they have been in at least 2,000 years, bad news for the world’s coastal cities facing rising seas in the coming decades. The new reconstruction uses numerous samples from natural archives (lake sediments, ice cores, tree rings, and others) to quantify both the cooling trend and recent warming with greater certainty than ever before. The study also included a sophisticated 2,000 year-long computer model simulation of climate change. The long-term cooling in that computer model was mostly due to the Earth’s slow rotational wobble and resulting reduction in seasonal sunlight in the Arctic. The degree and pattern of that cooling matched that shown by the natural archives, thereby increasing confidence in the computer model's ability to predict future temperature responses. The study suggests that greenhouse gases began “overriding” the natural cooling of Earth in the middle of the last century. And it further implies that the Arctic will continue to warm in the coming decades, increasing land-based ice loss and triggering global increases in sea-level rise. The team's study was published in Science on September 4th. Image: Meltwater streams off the rapidly melting Barnes Ice Cap, central Baffin Island, one of the largest ice caps in the Canadian Arctic. July 2009. Photo: Gifford Miller (INSTAAR).
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INSTAAR SCIENTISTS HELP BREAK ICE CORE DRILLING RECORD A new international research effort on the Greenland ice sheet - with Jim White helping lead the U.S. contribution - set a record for single-season deep ice-core drilling this summer, recovering more than a mile of ice core that is expected to help scientists better assess the risks of abrupt climate change in the future. The project, known as the North Greenland Eemian Ice Drilling, or NEEM, is being undertaken by 14 nations and is led by the University of Copenhagen. The goal is to retrieve ice from the last interglacial episode known as the Eemian Period that ended about 120,000 years ago. The period was warmer than today, with less ice in Greenland and 15-foot higher sea levels than present -- conditions similar to those Earth faces as it warms in the coming century and beyond. The team hopes to hit bedrock at 8,350 feet at the end of summer 2010, reaching ice deposited during the warm Eemian period that lasted from roughly 130,000 to 120,000 years ago before the planet began to cool and ice up once again. Other INSTAAR participants in the NEEM effort include INSTAAR postdoctoral researcher Vasilii Petrenko and Environmental Studies Program doctoral student Tyler Jones. The U.S. effort is funded by the National Science Foundation's Office of Polar Programs. Image: Main drilling dome under construction. Photo: NEEM.
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LEARN MORE ABOUT CLIMATE
Jim White is one of several CU-Boulder climate scientists featured in videos and other media for a new website called LearnMoreAboutClimate.colorado.edu. The site is designed to engage citizens from across Colorado - from middle school to community leaders - in learning more about climate and to encourage them to make lifestyle changes that help us be more sustainable and adaptable, contributing to the health of our state and planet. CU-Boulder is a global leader in energy and climate change research and environmental stewardship and is, thus, uniquely positioned to provide leadership in addressing this issue at the local level. The site was launched by CU-Boulder's Office for University Outreach in the Division of Continuing Education and Professional Studies. Site development was in partnership with INSTAAR and several other CU-Boulder institutes and departments. Image: Researchers on Niwot Ridge work to install a time-lapse camera to help study daily weather, snow distribution, and lake ice coverage. Photo: R. Anderson (INSTAAR).
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FIRE MITIGATION WORK IN U.S. WEST IS MISPLACED Tania Schoennagel (Geography and INSTAAR), along with colleagues at CU-Boulder, University of Montana, and Colorado State, have found that federal wildfire treatments have been minimally effective at mitigating the threat of wildfire to homes and people in the western United States. The team studied 44,000 wildfire mitigation projects in 11 western states between 2004 and 2008. They found that only 11 percent of those projects were located in or near the wildland-urban interface, the area with greatest potential to cut down catastrophic wildfire risk to communities. This result is in apparent contradiction to federal policies that stipulate significant resources should be invested in that high-risk zone. The research team also discovered that 70 percent of the area in and near that zone is privately owned, which limits the federal government's ability to perform mitigation. The results underscore the research team's call for a "significant shift in fire policy emphasis from federal to private lands" if protecting people and homes remains a primary goal. For example, reducing ignitable fuels and structures within around 100 feet of private homes, called “firewise”, has been shown to most effectively protect a home from burning. The study also suggests that future fire mitigation strategies should emphasize restricting the abundance and configuration of residential housing units near wildlands susceptible to fire, and improving cooperation among private and public landowners in implementing fire mitigation treatments and in paying for fire suppression. The team's work was published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS) of the United States of America. Image: Forest Service firefighters in California. Photo: Lou Angeli.
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ICE SHEETS CAN RETREAT IN A GEOLOGIC "INSTANT" Jason Briner (former INSTAAR, now SUNY-Buffalo) and Bob Anderson worked with Aaron Bini, a student of Briner's, to produce an exceptionally detailed record of past ice-sheet retreat through a fjord and - in the process - have provided insight into how present ice sheets in Greenland and Antarctica may thin and retreat with continued global warming. The authors carefully collected rock, shell, and other samples from Sam Ford Fjord in the eastern Canadian Arctic, with the target of documenting retreat of this portion of the eastern margin of the Laurentide Ice Sheet at the end of the last Ice Age. Dating of these samples, combined with previous and nearby records, showed that the outlet glacier in the fjord retreated ~40% of the distance between its maximum position and the present ice limit within only a few hundred years, equivalent to ~5% of the total time of deglaciation. Rates of retreat in the deep fjord were about an order of magnitude higher than in the either the shallow waters further offshore or once the glacier margin had reached land. This outlet glacier's response appears to be similar to the rapid retreat being documented in some of Greenland’s outlet glaciers, and by Tad Pfeffer’s group (INSTAAR) in Alaska’s Columbia Glacier. Rapid motion by sliding at the bed promotes thinning, which in turn leads to further acceleration. The new findings will help to develop more robust climate and ice sheet models that can better predict how global warming will affect ice sheets and the potential for rising sea levels in the future. The paper was published in the June 21 2009 issue of Nature Geoscience. Image: Aaron Bini and Jason Briner sampling glacially polished bedrock in the edge of Sam Ford Fjord, Baffin Island, for cosmogenic radionuclides. Photo: Bob Anderson May 2007.
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TYPE OF METHANE FOUND IN ANCIENT ICE IS GOOD NEWS FOR PLANET Vasilii Petrenko (INSTAAR postdoc) led a large international team in developing and applying a new technique for analyzing the carbon-14 content of methane in ancient Greenland ice. Their analyses suggest that a spike in the greenhouse gas methane about 11,600 years ago originated from wetlands rather than the ocean floor or from permafrost, a finding that is good news from a global warming standpoint. The research team spent five field seasons extracting several tons of ancient ice from the western margin of the Greenland ice sheet, the largest ice samples ever recovered for a climate change study. The researchers cut the ice into blocks with electric chain saws, dumped 17 cubic feet at a time into a vacuum melting tank heated by powerful propane torches, and transferred ancient air released from bubbles in the ice into cylinders for subsequent laboratory analysis. Carbon 14 of methane was measured in those cylinders as a "tracer" to date and distinguish wetland methane from methane clathrates, which are bound in ocean sediments and permafrost. As Earth emerged from the last ice age, temperatures in some places in the Northern Hemisphere shot up about 18 degrees Fahrenheit in just 20 years. Scientists have been concerned that such abrupt warming events could trigger huge oceanic methane "burps" caused by the dissociation of seafloor clathrates, providing a positive climate feedback mechanism that could drive up Earth's temperatures still further. "If we found that clathrates release a lot of methane to the atmosphere during abrupt episodes of warming, that could signal big trouble for the planet, " said Petrenko. "But even though wetlands appear be the primary source, it's still something to be concerned about." The team's research was published in Science on April 24. Image: CU-Boulder postdoctoral researcher Vasilii Petrenko, foreground, cleans a sample ice block from Greenland while Scripps Institution of Oceanography Professor Jeff Severinghaus loads another ice block into a vacuum melting tank. Photo courtesy Hinrich Schaefer.
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REDUCING "ROCK SNOT" IN BOULDER CREEK Matthew Miller, Diane McKnight, James Cullis, and colleagues have discovered that higher flow rates in Boulder Creek appear to cause a decrease in the amount of "rock snot" clinging to the rocks. Rock snot, a form of algae called Didymosphenia geminata or "didymo" for short, is native to the area. But something has caused the didymo to bloom out of control in parts of the local stream system, prompting researchers to label it a nuisance growth. "If there's some, that's OK," said McKnight. "But if it covers the stream bed with thick mats from side to side it becomes a problem. The didymo chokes out natural algae in the stream and destroys the habitat for insects on which the fish feed." The team's findings suggest that controlled flow releases from reservoirs during the summer could be used to limit the impact of this nuisance species in streams in the Colorado Front Range. Flows below Barker Reservoir near Nederland that are above 200 cubic feet per second -- similar to those experienced last year once the reservoir started to spill in late June -- appear to be sufficient to control the didymo. Such flows can make rocks move in the stream bed and destabilize the mats. Cullis is developing a two-dimensional model to predict how much water flow it would take to create movement in the stream bed at specific points in the creek. The team worked with two projects managed by INSTAAR: the Niwot Ridge Long-Term Ecological Research Site and Boulder Creek Critical Zone Observatory. The team's research was published in Hydrobiologia, an international journal of aquatic sciences. Local radio station KUNC interviewed both McKnight and Cullis as part of a ~4-minute segment on didymo (see link to right) Image: CU-Boulder doctoral candidate James Cullis holds a rock covered with a form of algae known as didymo or "rock snot" in South Boulder Creek. Photo by Matt Miller
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GIFFORD MILLER ELECTED A FELLOW OF THE AMERICAN GEOPHYSICAL UNION Gifford Miller was elected a fellow of the American Geophysical Union for his "pioneering work in dating methods as well as his insights into Quaternary climates and the role of humans in ecological change." Fellowship is bestowed on no more than 0.1 percent of the total AGU membership of about 45,000 in any given year and recognizes scientists who have attained acknowledged eminence in the geophysical sciences. Miller's primary research involves studying the geological record to evaluate the range of natural climate variability as a way to understand how Earth responds to climate changes as the result of ice ages. He has combined field observations with geochronological dating techniques in his research, with emphasis on the past 150,000 years -- one complete glacial-interglacial cycle of Earth. His interests include the timing and mechanisms of ice-sheet growth and decay in the Canadian and European Arctic and the interactions of ice sheets, oceans and the atmosphere during the last deglaciation. Miller also has developed new dating tools involving carbonate fossils as a way to date geological and archaeological events, and he has studied the impacts of human colonization on the megafauna of Australia and Madagascar. Previous AGU fellows at INSTAAR have included Robert Anderson, John Andrews, and Mark Meier. Image: Portrait of Gifford Miller.
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NEW SUPERCOMPUTER FOR EARTH-MODELING RESEARCH James Syvitski has led an effort to install a new supercomputer at INSTAAR that will vastly extend the ability of scientists across the globe to model and predict many important aspects of Earth's surface processes, from glacial melting and flooding to coastal erosion and tropical ocean storms. The new computer cluster is the heart of the National Science Foundation-funded Community Surface Dynamics Modeling System, or CSDMS, directed by Syvitski. CSDMS is a library of computational tools used by scientists worldwide to model and predict natural and human-influenced environmental events. It is one of three prongs of an NSF effort to model the Earth; the other two focus on Earth's atmosphere (NCAR, Boulder) and earthquakes, volcanoes and continental movement (CalTech, Pasdena). An important mission of the CSDMS program is to involve academic and industry scientists across the globe, allowing them to contribute their own research and use existing models. Currently, CSDMS consists of a network of over 250 scientists from 22 countries. While the community is a virtual one, the CU-Boulder integration facility is the physical core responsible for the workings of the system. Researchers at the Boulder facility host about 15 meetings a year and have eight focused research groups. The groups meet once a year and include a carbonate working group, a hydrology working group and a coastal working group. The new computer will boost the capabilities of the science community. "We now will be able to run simulations that we never could run previously, at a time and space resolution that will make the environmental industry want to work with us", said Syvitski. Image: CSDMS Director James Syvitski at the ribbon-cutting ceremony.
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SYNTHESIS REPORT ON PAST CLIMATE VARIABILITY IN THE ARCTIC AND IMPLICATIONS FOR THE FUTURE Gifford Miller and Jim White are two of the six lead authors on a new synthesis of past Arctic climates and corresponding implications for future climate change. More than 30 additional scientists contributed to the report, including John Andrews, Anne Jennings, and INSTAAR affiliates Lesleigh Anderson, Scott Elias, and Dan Muhs. Led by the US Geological Survey, the team found that Arctic Amplification - the process by which the high northern latitudes respond more intensely to hemispheric or global climate changes - has been a pervasive feature of the Earth's climate system for at least the last four million years, during both warming times and cooling times. Thus, the current enhanced temperature increase in the Arctic is likely to continue into the future with further glacier and ice-sheet melting, sea-level rise, coastal erosion, and loss of summertime sea ice. The size and speed of the summer sea-ice loss over the last few decades is highly unusual compared to events from previous thousands of years, especially considering that changes in Earth's orbit over this time have made sea-ice melting less, not more, likely. Sustained warming of at least a few degrees above average 20th century values is likely to cause the nearly complete, eventual disappearance of the Greenland ice sheet, which would raise sea level by several meters. The current rate of human-influenced Arctic warming is comparable to peak natural rates documented by reconstructions of past climates. However, some projections of future human-induced change exceed documented natural variability. When thresholds in the climate system were crossed in the past, climate change was often very large and very fast. Similar events cannot be ruled out with human-induced climate change in the future. The four main chapters of the report are being re-written for scientists and will be published in Fall 2009 by Quaternary Science Reviews. Image: cover of the report.
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ENCYCLOPEDIA OF PALEOCLIMATOLOGY AND ANCIENT ENVIRONMENTS Lesleigh Anderson, John Andrews, Tom Marchitto, Giff Miller, and Daniel Muhs wrote sections of this fantastic new resource, edited by Vivien Gornitz (Columbia University and NASA Goddard). The Encyclopedia of Paleoclimatology and Ancient Environments, a companion volume to the recently-published Encyclopedia of World Climatology, provides the reader with an entry point to the rapidly expanding field of paleoclimatology—the study of climates of the past. Highly interdisciplinary in nature, paleoclimatology integrates information from a broad array of disciplines in the geosciences, ranging from stratigraphy, geomorphology, glaciology, paleoecology, paleobotany to geochemistry and geophysics, among others. The encyclopedia offers 230 informative articles written by over 200 well known international experts on numerous subjects, ranging from classical geological evidence to the latest research. The volume is abundantly illustrated with line-drawings, black-white and color photographs. Articles are arranged alphabetically, with extensive bibliographies and cross-references. The articles are targeted for faculty, students and professionals in any aspect of climate research. Image: cover of the Encyclopedia.
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CURBING INVASIVE PLANT SPECIES IN THE BOULDER REGION Tim Seastedt, Aaron Strong (Univ. of Wyoming), and David Knochel (CU-Boulder) have been awarded a $500,000 grant from the U.S. Department of Agriculture to help reduce invasive plant species in the Boulder region. They will be employing research, modeling and outreach in partnership with Boulder Open Space and Mountain Parks (OSMP). The project will focus on three weed species viewed as threats to the conservation goals of OSMP, including Dalmation toadflax, Canada thistle and cheatgrass. Managing invasive plant species on the Great Plains has become more challenging in recent years in the face of human-caused environmental change. A warmer and longer growing season, increases in atmospheric carbon dioxide levels and nitrogen deposition on the Great Plains amplify the ability of weedy species to compete with native plants. Classic weed-control techniques like pulling, mowing, herbicide treatments, fire and grazing that knock back invaders often leave ecological "vacuums" that can give other exotic plant species the chance for a foothold. The grant provides for an outreach effort that will involve middle and high school students in Boulder County. The students will be getting hands-on experience in working with different insect species that might be useful as control agents for invasive plant species. "This effort will expose these students to real science, and hopefully kindle their interest in the many ecological changes occurring in the county, nation and world," Seastedt said. Image: Tim Seastedt on a South Boulder grassland.
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