Andrew Felton, who is currently a USDA-NIFA postdoctoral fellow studying rangeland sensitivity to drought, will leave us this fall to join the faculty in the Department of Land Resources and Environmental Sciences at Montana State University. 

His lab will focus on understanding how climate change impacts the functioning of western US dryland and agricultural systems, with an emphasis on the consequences of ongoing intensification of the water cycle (e.g., drought). He'll be looking for graduate students and postdoctoral associates - what a great opportunity. 

We are so excited for Andrew and could not be more excited to continue collaborating far in the future! 

Orange, Calif. — A new instrument on the International Space Station (ISS) is helping scientists understand the inner workings of plant life here on Earth by showing how different plants balance the tradeoffs between growth and water use. A team of scientists from NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and Chapman University has now undertaken a major global study of these tradeoffs, described as plant water-use efficiency, among 9 different plant types in 11 ecosystems around the world using tens of millions of observations.
 
In this first-of-its kind study, “Convergence in water use efficiency within plant functional types across contrasting climates,” published on April 14th in the prestigious journal Nature Plants, the authors found that plants of the same type (such as deciduous broadleaf and evergreen needleleaf trees, tall or low shrubs, herbs and non-herbaceous grasses, etc.) often had very similar water-use efficiency regardless of where they grew. Interestingly, the results indicate that it is the type of plants, rather than the climate in which they are growing, that dictates the water-use efficiency. The results also indicate that plant types with longer lifespans, such as shrubs and trees, have higher water-use efficiency than plant types like grasses, which have shorter lifespans. These findings provide important insights into how global climate change will shape the future of plant communities and the ecosystem services they provide.
 
Plants use and lose water when they take up carbon dioxide to photosynthesize and grow. Plant species capable of growing more while using less water may be more resilient to the increasing frequency, intensity and duration of drought events projected to occur with global climate change. The study also reveals connections in how environmental conditions can shape current and future plant community characteristics, key for understanding the future of plant biodiversity. Knowing how different plant types optimize the tradeoffs between growth and water use, the so-called plant water-use efficiency, can inform plans to mitigate and adapt to a warmer and drier future.
 
This type of analysis was enabled by the data collected from the ISS instrument, known as ECOSTRESS, which provides the most detailed temperature images of Earth’s surface ever acquired from space. These temperature images indicate evapotranspiration and photosynthesis rates. Previously, the low-resolution of available data and disagreements among different land surface models led to wildly varying measurements of water-use efficiency.
 
“ECOSTRESS revealed patterns that we could not observe with previous satellite instruments and that would be impossible to measure on the ground,” said lead JPL author Ms. Savannah Cooley. For instance, using ECOSTRESS images from the Brazilian Amazon, the study demonstrated significant variation in water-use efficiency by plant type over the scale of just a few miles of seemingly similar tropical rainforest, as well as abrupt changes where forests had been converted to pasture. 
 
The data originate from ECOSTRESS, the ECOsystem Spaceborne Thermal Radiometer Experiment on Space Station, a mission launched by NASA in 2018 to provide information on global land surface temperature at unprecedented spatial and temporal resolutions. ECOSTRESS was built by NASA’s Jet Propulsion Laboratory (JPL) and launched into orbit aboard a SpaceX Dragon cargo spacecraft lifted by a Falcon 9 rocket. ECOSTRESS now sends images at a resolution less than that of a football field every 2-3 days.
 
“ECOSTRESS is remarkable in that it allows us to determine plant water use nearly anywhere on Earth at spatial scales that were unthinkable just a few years ago, all from an instrument that is traveling more than 17,000 miles per hour more than 250 miles above us,” noted study co-author Dr. Joshua Fisher.
 
The new study was led by Ms. Savannah Cooley, a graduate student at Columbia University and scientist at JPL, in collaboration with Dr. Joshua Fisher and Dr. Gregory Goldsmith at Chapman University. Fisher is a Presidential Fellow of Ecosystem Science in Schmid College of Science and Technology; he was the Science Lead for ECOSTRESS while at JPL prior to joining Chapman. Fisher is the first faculty member in Chapman University’s history to be named a highly cited researcher by Clarivate, placing him in the top 1% of researchers globally. Goldsmith is an Assistant Professor of Biological Sciences and Director of the Grand Challenges Initiative; he is a member of NASA’s ECOSTRESS Science and Applications Team.
 
Measurements provided by ECOSTRESS are also useful for detecting wildfires, urban heat waves, volcanic activity, and a number of other applications.
 
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The title of the paper is “Convergence in water use efficiency within plant functional types across contrasting climates,” and is available online at: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41477-022-01131-z. Support was provided by the ECOSTRESS mission and by the NASA Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Science grant # 80NSSC20K0216.

Among the great accomplishments of folks in the lab, we're sending Cami Acosta to Sanford Research in Sioux  Falls, South Dakota for an NSF Research Experience for Undergraduates this summer. She'll be joining the Surendran Lab to study kidney development and disease! Can't wait to see the results! 

Recent graduate Sydni Au Hoy has been offered a COMET (Clinical Observation and Medical Transcription Fellowship) at Stanford Medicine. A great next step on her pathway to becoming a doctor! 

A big shout out to Andrew Felton, who will begin a USDA-NIFA postdoctoral fellowship with us on September 1st. Andrew will work on a project entitled: Optimizing rangeland decision making by unraveling geographic variation in the timing of forage sensitivity to weather. 

Check out the write-up on the project in Chapman's Newsroom. 

​The Goldsmith Lab has been awarded the 2019 Ignacio Rodriguez-Iturbe award for an outstanding publication from the journal Ecohydrology for their article quantifying the spatial variation in stable isotopes of water in a forest ecosystem. The research establishes best practices for using stable isotopes of water as a tool for understanding the source of water used by different species of trees in forest ecosystems:
 
Spatial variation in throughfall, soil, and plant water isotopes in a temperate forest
by Gregory R. Goldsmith, Scott T. Allen, Sabine Braun, Nadine Engbersen, Clara R. González‐Quijano, James W. Kirchner, Rolf T.W. Siegwolf 
  
The results are part of a long-term collaboration designed to inform the sustainable management of Switzerland’s forests in the face of unprecedented rates of climate change.
 
The project was carried out in collaboration with researchers from the Institute for Applied Plant Biology, the Swiss Federal Institute for Forest, Snow and Landscape Research and ETH Zurich with funding from the Swiss Federal Office of the Environment.

We have a new preprint posted to Edarxiv from the teaching team in the Grand Challenges Initiative at Chapman University: 

Discussion can be an important and powerful tool in efforts to build a more diverse, equitable, and inclusive future for STEM. However, facilitating discussions on complex and uncomfortable issues, like racism and sexism, can feel daunting. We outline a series of steps that can be used in offices, laboratories, and classrooms to facilitate productive discussions that empower everyone to listen, contribute, learn, and ultimately act to transform STEM.

Read the full text here: FULL TEXT 

It is feeling like the end of an era in our lab. But so many great things are happening: 

Dr. Eleinis Àvila-Lovera has started an Earl S. Tupper Fellowship at Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. We continue to collaborate on project funded by a USDA-AFRI grant designed to understand the effects of green stem photosynthesis on hydraulic functioning in avocados. 

Dr. Scott T. Allen has started a faculty position at the University of Nevada, Reno. We continue to collaborate on a project funded by the Swiss Federal Office of the Environment designed to understand the future of Switzerland's forest ecosystems. 

Dr. Carter Berry has moved back east to his old haunting grounds in North Carolina. We continue to collaborate on a project funded by a USDA-AFRI grant designed to understand the effects of diffuse light photosynthesis on plant gas exchange. 

Dr. Andrew Felton joins us from Peter Adler's laboratory at Utah State University. Andrew will bring together our research on wood water storage and satellite remote sensing, funded by grants from USDA-AFRI and NASA. We are so excited to have Andrew as part of our community.