Gregory E. Maurer

New Mexico State University | NMSU · Jornada Basin LTER

The Mojave Desert has warmed >2°C, and aridified, in the past 50 years, making it a strategic location to investigate climate change impacts on arid soil processes. We resampled a climosequence of soils in the Mojave first sampled in 1973 and compared current soil properties to those 45+ years earlier. Radiocarbon changes revealed that C is cycling...

Diurnal branch movements in woody plants have only recently been described in detail. While previously only vegetative and reproductive structures have been known to move on hourly timescales, imaging technologies such as terrestrial laser scanning and near‐surface repeat digital photography provide a means of remotely monitoring plant movements at...

Understanding the response of grassland production and carbon exchange to intra-annual variation in precipitation and nitrogen addition is critical for sustainable grassland management and ecosystem restoration. We introduced growing-season drought treatments of different lengths (15, 30, 45 and 60 day drought) by delaying growing-season precipitat...

Primary production, a key regulator of the global carbon cycle, is highly responsive to variations in climate. Yet, a detailed, continental‐scale risk assessment of climate‐related impacts on primary production is lacking. We combined 16 years of MODIS NDVI data, a remotely sensed proxy for primary production, with observations from 1218 climate st...

Deserts comprise a large portion of the Earth's land area, yet their role in the fluxes and cycles of greenhouse gases is poorly known and their likely response to climate change largely unexplored. We report a reconnaissance investigation of the concentrations and fluxes of CO2, CH4, and N2O along two elevation (climate) gradients in the southwest...

Understanding controls on net primary production (NPP) has been a long-standing goal in ecology. Climate is a well-known control on NPP, although the temporal differences among years within a site are often weaker than the spatial pattern of differences across sites. Climate sensitivity functions describe the relationship between an ecological resp...

Climate-driven tree mortality has increased globally in response to warmer temperature and more severe drought. To examine how tree mortality in semi-arid biomes impacts surface water balance, we experimentally manipulated a piñon-juniper (PJ) woodland by girdling all adult piñon trees in a 4 ha area, decreasing piñon basal area by ~65%. Over 3.5 y...

Global-scale studies suggest that dryland ecosystems dominate an increasing trend in the magnitude and interannual variability of the land CO2 sink. However, such analyses are poorly constrained by measured CO2 exchange in drylands. Here we address this observation gap with eddy covariance data from 25 sites in the water-limited Southwest region of...

Bark beetle outbreaks are widespread in western North American forests, reducing primary productivity and transpiration, leading to forest mortality across large areas, and altering ecosystem carbon cycling. Here the carbon isotope composition (δ(13) C) of soil respiration (δJ ) was monitored in the decade after disturbance for forests affected nat...

Global modeling efforts indicate semiarid regions dominate the increasing trend and interannual variation of net CO2 exchange with the atmosphere, mainly driven by water availability. Many semiarid regions are expected to undergo climatic drying, but the impacts on net CO2 exchange are poorly understood due to limited semiarid flux observations. He...

Urban montane valleys are often characterized by periodic wintertime temperature inversions (cold air pools) that increase atmospheric particulate matter concentrations, potentially stimulating the deposition of major ions to these snow-covered ecosystems. We assessed spatial and temporal patterns of ion concentrations in snow across urban to monta...

Dust deposition lowers the albedo of snow and can significantly alter snowpack energy balance. Investigation of aeolian dust deposition in the mountains of the western U.S. has shown that these effects advance the timing of snowpack melt and spring runoff across much of the region. These studies have primarily focused on alpine snowpacks with littl...

Mountain snowpacks directly and indirectly influence soil temperature (Tsoil) and soil water content (θ). Vegetation, soil organisms, and associated biogeochemical processes certainly respond to snowpack-related variability in the soil biophysical environment, but there is currently a poor understanding of how snow-soil interactions vary in time an...

The insulation provided by seasonal snowpacks is an important controller of temperature in mountain soils, but the significance of this effect across the landscape is not well understood. We analyzed recent records of snowpack and soil temperature from the NRCS SNOTEL network, a network of automated snow monitoring stations in the Rocky Mountains,...

Dust deposition on snowpacks above tree line accelerates the spring melt through its influence on the albedo of the snow surface, but is unclear if the melt rate is similarly affected under subalpine forest canopies. We used a dust manipulation experiment to influence the melt cycle of a subalpine forest snowpack, and monitored soil water content a...

Fine root processes play a prominent role in the carbon and nutrient cycling of boreal ecosystems due to the high proportion of biomass allocated belowground and the rapid decomposition of fine roots relative to aboveground tissues. To examine these issues in detail, major components of ecosystem carbon flux were studied in three mature black spruc...