On Feb. 14, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration announced that El Niño officially arrived. Information from the UA's Climate Assessment for the Southwest's website is used to explain shifting jet stream patterns.
With an unparalleled network of environmental monitoring stations, research field sites, data, and interdisciplinary scientists, the UA is pioneering use-inspired ecosystem research that helps manage and conserve the lands, forests, oceans, landscapes, and wildlife of the western U.S. and beyond for those who enjoy and depend upon them.
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From San Diego County to Texas' Rio Grande Valley, citizen-scientists deployed to 20 border-area sites for the second annual Border BioBlitz, a two-day volunteer effort to record as many species of flora and fauna as possible along roughly one-kilometer stretches on each side of the U.S.-Mexico line. Taylor Edwards, an associate staff scientist at the UA, and Anthony Mendoza, a researcher at the UA herbarium, are quoted.
A 2016 study found that more than 450 plants and animals have undergone local extinctions due to climate change. If nothing is done, these species face the risk of becoming extinct at the global level. "If global warming continues, species that cannot change or move quickly enough may go globally extinct," said John Wiens, a researcher at the UA and the study's lead author.
In the middle of the exhibit hall at the University of Arizona's Laboratory of Tree-Ring Research stands a 4,000-pound sample of a Giant Sequoia that began its growth in 212 A.D. and fell in 1915. The laboratory houses over 2.5 million wood research specimens in its archive for study.
A team of ecologists used lidar technology to scan the leaf canopy of an Amazon forest and found that trees responded to drought in some surprising ways.