Research news

From Dec. 11-15, tens of thousands of people from 100+ countries will gather in San Francisco for the 2023 meeting of the American Geophysical Union. Scientists from CU Boulder, including INSTAARs Anne Jennings, Ben Li, and Nicole Lovenduski, are tagged as Earth science experts in this CU Boulder Today resource on the conference.

Tim Seastedt discusses how low-cost landscape restoration actions in Colorado can foster a more diverse and absorbent environment. These actions can rebuild soils and recharge soil water storage, increasing the ability of plants to perform evapotranspiration. Such changes provide many environmental benefits.

Anne Jennings and her colleagues spent two months on a ship off the coast of Greenland drilling sediment cores deep below the ocean floor. They were searching for clues that will help predict melting patterns of major ice sheets in our warming world.

Supported by a new five-year, $2.5 million grant from the National Science Foundation, a group of researchers at five universities will examine how rapidly warming temperatures and shorter winters can influence the growth and toxicity of lake algae. Isabella Oleksy, who studies aquatic ecosystems and recently joined INSTAAR, is leading the Colorado contingent at CU Boulder.

Julia Moriarty (INSTAAR & ATOC) was named a U.S. Department of Energy (DOE) Early Career Researcher, receiving multiyear funding. The program helps support the next generation of U.S. STEM leaders. She will be working to improve predictability of water quality following floods in coastal urban systems.

Long-Term Ecological Research Network communicator Gabriel De La Rosa spent three intense days on Niwot Ridge collecting the hundreds of data points that are a record of change in the alpine.

INSTAAR is pleased to announce four George R. Aiken Graduate Fellowships for 2023. CU Boulder graduate students Mackensie Bowen, Allison Cook, Tim Higgins, and Millie Spencer received the awards, which come with funding to support their research over the next year.

Researchers in the Taylor Lab study interactions between higher-elevation dwelling mountain chickadees and the closely related lower-elevation dwelling black capped chickadees. A recent study in Global Change Biology investigates barriers that prevent the two species from mating and what happens when they do mate and produce offspring.

Julio Sepúlveda (INSTAAR Fellow and GEOL Associate Professor) is part of a team of scientists from seven collaborating institutions who were awarded a new research grant that will fund an investigation of the ecological and environmental changes that occurred on land after the asteroid impact and mass extinction event at the Cretaceous/Paleogene (K/Pg) boundary.

A group from the University of Georgia is looking at alpine cushion plants—compact green mounds with small leaves and ephemeral flowers that hug Niwot Ridge and are found in many alpine areas across the world. They are studying how the flowering time and reproduction of these plants is changing as the climate warms and snowmelt advances.