Three regional CASCs - the Northeast, South Central and Pacific Islands - will cease operations in coming weeks because Dept of the Interior won’t approve their next 5-year agreements. Other CASCs have had projects cancelled and funds reprogrammed in violation of Congressional appropriations.

You think you know oak trees by their bark? Here are two >200 year old bur oaks I sampled in Northern Wisconsin, a St Croix River flood plain/terrace.

14,000 yr-old in situ stumps sampled today! 🥰 Wood that old cannot be found in the Alps, but in the Prealps! In Southern Alps, some torrential systems feature Lateglacial Pinus sylvestris outcrops! So BEAUTIFUL! (Rooted stumps+paleosol+alluvial sediments) 📷 L. Francon PI: C. Miramont (both IMBE)

Tree ring 14C and 13C content reveal reliance on fast cycling carbon for pine growth in semiarid montane forests

The NW Climate Adaptation Science Center recently convened 100 scientists & managers to synthesize what's known and unknown about the ecological impacts of the 2021 PNW heat wave, and what can be done to manage risks from extreme heat events. Products now available! 👇 nwcasc.uw.edu/programs/act...

Today a former student dropped off this white cedar cross section that clocks in at exactly 300 rings. It is from an area we have been developing a chronology, so it will be a nice addition. The dead tree was felled as a hazard. The sample was from halfway up the stem due to extensive basal decay.

Living hemlock stump due to root grafting (i.e., the real wood-wide web).

I, owner of many saws, apparently now own an ice saw too.

✨ Paper spotlight ✨ (🧵 1/5) Distal to proximal: a continuum of drivers shaping tree growth and carbon partitioning doi.org/10.1111/nph....

The MSU Plant Resilience Institute is excited to launch an open rank tenure-track faculty search! We're seeking creative, collaborative researchers to join the PRI faculty to investigate plant responses to environmental challenges. 🌱 Apply now: careers.msu.edu/jobs/assista... #PlantSciJobs

I don't know how many people have asked whether Lake Superior has been anomalously warm during recent years, but my lab has been on the job! Preliminary data indicate that it has been warming very fast of late (at least it's surface temps). Peer-reviewed results will have to wait a few months.

The Garnet Fire has burned through a place I have worked since 2002. A place I hold dear. We knew this wasn't a matter of if, but when. Unfortunately the leadership on the Sierra National Forest didn't have the same urgency that we did. My eulogy for Teakettle. www.hurteaulab.org/blog/a-eulog...

I am down to the bottom of the barrel for sunken hemlocks to measure. Only samples with few rings (<100) after this one that saw some things. I didnt have a lot of hope for this sample, but it still cross-dated reasonably well except for one section of micro-rings w/ 4 missing rings

Forest treatments work to reduce wildfire risk to carbon storage, and also to hot drought mortality. We need more treatments, and we need them now, but also, we need them to be ongoing into the future.🧪🔥 www.frontiersin.org/journals/for...

COMMENTARY: If this was happening in another nation, we'd call it by name. It's authoritarianism.

New paper alert (thread)! "Whitebark pine [WBP] in the United States projected to experience an 80% reduction in climatically suitable area by the mid-21st century" In this paper, we modeled WBP climatic suitability under reference period (1961-1990) and mid-21st century climate 1/6

Yesterday was a Lake Superior beach day. Not many people for Labor Day weekend. The colors of rocks are always so varied and pleasing. I have never been anywhere else with such great rocks on the beach.

Today's sample is just... perfect! 🌲💍😍 Can't wait to find out which part of the Holocene it belongs to! 🧊⏳ #subfossil #glacier #Alps

This piece pushes our hemlock chronology from the Huron Mts, MI back to the 1400s CE. The rings crossdate on this species better than pines in many cases, but many sunken logs have extensive decay that make it a pain to prep and measure.

New assessment on the biophysical potential of forestation to sequester carbon. As expected, we found just a fraction of what other assessments found, because we considered the obvious no-nos, such as risk to biodiversity, excess water use, and regional warming. theconversation.com/the-climate-...

Trump admin planning to change student visas from lasting for duration of academic program to fixed 4-yr term, and then much harder to renew Could destroy US ability to attract global talent, particularly those seeking advanced degrees in STEM. The median time to complete a PhD is 5.7 yrs per NSF.

Re-posting here for the late crowd. We are hiring a new TT position in Data Science/Biostatistics. Please apply or re-skeet!

New Tenure Track Position in Data Science or Biostatistics with us here at MTU is live. We have great people here in a fantastic location that is probably a lot cooler (temperature-wise) than wherever you live during summer! www.employment.mtu.edu/en-us/job/49...

SCOTUS thought they could ride the tiger and get what they wanted ideologically. In exchange, they would give him everything he wanted except the Fed. Just leave the Fed alone and you can ignore all federal law. But it ended the same way it has for everyone who tried to ride the tiger since 2016.

My latest: The Trump administration is not waiting for the next fiscal year -- or Congress -- to cut climate science at NOAA. A new document details the money it won't spend *this* year on climate research.

This is certainly one of the worst papers I have read in @nature.com

New publication about intra-annual growth responses in pine trees to hydro-climatic conditions. The study is a collaboration between the TURBERAS (University of Geneva) and MOSS (Lund University) Enjoy! 🌳 💍 🔬 www.sciencedirect.com/science/arti...

Forest health in the Rocky Mountains declines, which is why we looked into drought resilience via in situ stable isotope measurements of soil & tree waters on daily basis. We found that aspen are adjusting their water uptake dynamics within days to water availability changes. doi.org/10.1029/2024...

Wow, I love the cover art on the Marquette monthly featuring a driftwood sunset on the shore of Lake Superior!

New PhD position in Plant Ecophysiology🌳 Study how atmospheric & soil drought shape tree carbon & water relations at the VPDrought experiment in Switzerland. Start Jan 2026. Apply here: m.refline.ch/273855/1759/... @wslresearch.bsky.social

A new study w/ Emily Burt, @scottallenunr.bsky.social, et al. via @aguecohydro.bsky.social made possible by @bafu.admin.ch. We use >3500 lysimeter isotope observations from 47 sites over 3 years to measure how rainfall percolates into soils, with estimates of young water at different soil depths.

🚨 Postdoc opening 🚨 Join us at Forest Biology Center (Poznań, Poland) to study forest ecology under climate change. 2-year contract (extendable), start Jan 2026 (flexible). Apply by Sept 30, 2025. 🔗 forestbiologycenter.amu.edu.pl/our-team/joi...

Tree-ring fire records from 649 pine trees in central and eastern Arizona show that fires occurred more often in the territory of the Western Apache, or Ndee, than in other regions between 1600–1870, suggesting a culturally controlled fire regime. In PNAS: www.pnas.org/doi/10.1073/...

Hi All! I'm back from sabbatical and teaching Plant Ecophys again - a class near and dear to my heart! In the past, I've welcomed grad students and post-docs to share their research with students and their stories about how they got into the field.....

The University of Arizona is hiring a tenure-track Assistant/Associate Professor in Physical Geography! Research specialities could include wildfire, climate and water resources, and/or natural hazards, amongst others. Please apply and join us! arizona.csod.com/ux/ats/caree...

Removed some boards on our covered deck that had become decayed on the outer edges after 57 yrs. I could tell that there was some nice wood underneath the many layers of paint. According to my nose it is old ponderosa pine. And, there was even a fire scar (at center, transected by a rusty nail)!

I spend arguably too much time looking at lakes in Google Earth However, today I came across a lake that has more submerged logs than I have ever seen. This one 50 m section has >200 logs visible. I estimate there are at least 7,000 logs preserved in this remote, undeveloped lake in MI's U.P.

New paper out on the dangers of using patterns across spatial climate gradients to predict what will happen with changing climate. That includes species distribution modeling. Space-for-time substitution can be misleading in sign, not just the magnitude of effects. www.nature.com/articles/s41...

I really hope SOU hangs in there. It is a wonderful small school in a fantastic place for biology/ecology and performing arts. I was once a post-doc there -- the only post-doc at the university. Perhaps the only post-doc ever...

How do tropical #trees deal with droughts? The answer is published today in @science.org Our pantropical #treering analysis revealed 2.5% growth reduction during #drought years. Yet, growth declined by >10% in 1/4 of 500 study sites, and in hotter & drier regions. doi.org/10.1126/scie... 🌍🍁🌐 (1/4)

An isotope diet study that might make you squirm.

NEW: i spoke to nine (!) scientists across several disciplines whose work was cited in the new Department of Energy report that downplays the severity of climate change. all of them say their work was misrepresented, cherry picked, and/or lacked context —

I've been getting a lot of requests for comments on the DOE report "A critical review of the impact of U.S. greenhouse gas emissions on the U.S. climate". Here are some initial thoughts. More will come later.

A while ago, we started a #FixItFriday tradition. We keep a running list - large & small, digital & analog, anything broken or annoying - and work on it together. Today's 30-second fix: to remove AI "preview" from search results, here's the setting for Chrome users: www.reddit.com/r/techsuppor...

As many of you know our lab has been collecting logs out of lakes in the UP of Michigan. From 2020-23 we sampled mostly pine logs from the littoral zone (shorelines <1.5 m depth, <10 m from shore) In 2024 we sampled trees from deeper waters, 2-5 m depth, from two of the same lakes shown here (1/8)

Come work with us! We are looking to fill a PhD (mountain forest management) and PostDoc position (forest adaptive capacity, w/ @juditlecinadiaz.bsky.social). We'd be happy to have you as part of our dynamic team! PhD: www.lss.ls.tum.de/fileadmin/w0... PostDoc: www.lss.ls.tum.de/fileadmin/w0...

USDA reorg guts forest protection & science * the timber industry's Forest Products Lab stays * All 9 Forest Service Regional Offices: gone within a year * All Research Stations: consolidated into one in Fort Collins HR, contracting, FOIA, tribal relations, civil rights — all centralized

I have written about this before, when it was suggested as a possibility shortly after the inauguration. A quick summary here--in short, there's little clever or thoughtful about it, though there is some legal strategy at work, however cynical. 1/n www.nytimes.com/2025/07/22/c...

I can think of 2 times when leading U.S. officials fled Washington in a panic: August 1814: British forces briefly capture the capital and set fire to government buildings. July 2025: Republicans fear they'll have to vote on the Epstein files, so they adjourn early and run for the hills.

The latest batch of 500 more NSF graduate fellowships tilted heavily towards AI & quantum (but largely shutting out life sciences, social sciences, etc.) Today, Acting Director Stone said that was the "direct intervention of OSTP", naming Michael Kratsios. www.youtube.com/live/9Os9sAA...