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The Huxman Laboratory on a field trip to Organ Pipe Cactus National Park some time ago - Left-to-right are Jessie Cable, Dan Potts, Danielle Ignace and Alex Eilts.

Folks in the laboratory include:

Post-doctoral researchers

Dr. Mitchell Pavao-Zuckerman - Mitch is interested in a number of things, including soil food webs, carbon and nitrogen cycling in soils, soil microbial crusts, urban ecology, and those small critters that live in soils that I've never contemplated in depth (until now!). He is the key to openning the 'black box' of soils in our lab. Of course he appropriately considers plants 'green slime'.

Dr. Sarah Kimball - Sarah is an evolutionary ecologist who studies how species’ traits interact with the abiotic environment to determine range limits and community composition. She is currently working as a post-doctoral researcher focusing on a tradeoff between relative growth rate and water use efficiency in Sonoran Desert winter annuals.

Technician

Nate Pierce - Nate comes to us from Cornell University, where he recieved his MS with David Wolfe studying the effects of atmosphereic CO2 concentration on plants that people might actually care about!. He has an endless supply of energy, even going so far as to climb mountains before coming into work each morning! He keeps our large-scale ecosystem projects running and makes everyone's life better in the lab.

Graduate Students

Greg Barron-Gafford - Greg also has special status as a Research Specialist in the lab, over whom Larry Venable, Goggy Davidowitz and Judie Bronstein all fight with me for time. He's a physiological ecologist who can do most anything when it comes to getting things for free from Li-Cor. Luckily, he's good at being the heavy-hand in the lab and keeps all the undergraduates in line. His dissertation work is focused on examining how woody encroachment in upland and riparian areas effects ecosystem properties at mulitple scales.

Anna Tyler - We tricked Anna to come here from Will Pockman's laboratory in New Mexico. She is really amazingly focused in her scientific persuit - asking questions on how breeding system and pollination may impact Datura wrightii offspring performance or how indirect and direct effects of annual plants influence desert ecosystem processes.

Henry Adams - Henry is the newest member of the lab. He is currently engaged in research quantifying the physiological threshold of drought-induced mortality in pinyon pine (Pinus edulis). We are using the unique environmental controls of the Biosphere 2 Facility to compare tree physiological response and mortality under a global change type drought with that of current climate conditions.

Past folks from the laboratory

Dan Potts - Dan is now an Assistant Professor at Buffalo State College. At the UofA he studied the exchanges of materials and energy from desert ecosystems, and how that is controlled by precipitation. He used small chamber and micrometeorological techniques to look at the sensitivity of ecosystem fluxes to precipitation considering such factors as seasonality and between-year lag effects. He's out of here though - after a stint in California to surf, skateboard, and keep it real with the Long Beach crew, Dan moved to NY.

Jessie Cable - Jessie in now a post-doc in the Department of Botany in the Ogle lab. She is interested in the interaction between climate variability and ecosystem function. At UofA she studied the time-course of activity for different biological components in desert ecosystems (plants, bugs, etc.) following precipitation events. She was interested in understanding how different sized rain events interacted with other climate factors to affect the way ecosystems work. She's the one in our lab that used isotopes and understood Keeling plots.

Danielle Ignace - Danielle is now a Research Associate in Peter Chesson's lab. While in our lab, she evaluated how leaf level physiological processes are regulated by precipitation patterns in desert species and how these result in different carbon exchange patterns for whole plants. She was focused on understanding not only the up- and down-regulation of photosynthesis through time, but the sensitivity of stomata to environmental drivers as water changes in availability. Danielle is from Wisconson and uses her extensive training to keep the lab from purchasing poor quality cheese and beer.

Alex Eilts - Alex is now a Research Associate at the W. K. Kellogg Biological Station. While in our lab, he worked on the boundaries of community ecology and physiological ecology, asking about how processes like competition are actually played out in real ecosystems. Alex is interested in tropical islands, so he studied non-native grass invasions in the Sonoran desert.

Ed Bobich, Past post-doctoral researcher who has now landed that wonderful faculty position at California Polytechnic University Pomona!