Tasting: Adam Wolf brought about 15 Power Bars of different brands. Their content varied from five to 23 gm of protein/bar and included both Girl and Boy bars. Most had a chocolate flavor, but some were caramel or spicy. Because many people in the Field Lab were away analyzing the harvest at Jasper Ridge, Asner's group joined us for this delicious Tasting. Included were Post Doc Natalie Boelman who is about to leave for a position at the Lamont-Doherty Geological Observatory of Columbia University, NY. and Lab Tech, Kim Carlson who will be enrolled in a PhD program at Yale Univ. in September. Kim plans to spend part of the summer in Thailand learning Thai Massage. Former student, Dave Lobell also happened to stop by and showed off photos of his very new baby son, Kai.
Test application of the laser-induced fluorescence transient (LIFT) instrument
PIs: Joe Berry, Roland Pieruschka (Carnegie Instit. & Forschungszentrum Juelich), Zbigniew Kolber and Dennis Klimov (MBARI)
Summary: The photosynthetic machinery that enables plants to convert sunlight to chemical energy has two means of dissipating light energy that exceeds a leaf's needs—fluorescence, which is the instantaneous re-emission of light of another wavelength, and heat. Leaf fluorescence can also be actively stimulated with an external light source, and this has become a powerful technique for studying photosynthesis by individual leaves. A new experiment at the Sun field station is extending the approach to plant canopies by inducing fluorescence with an eye-safe laser.
Right: Roland Pieruschka with the LIFT instrument
Robin Martin is in Hawaii for three months doing eddy covariance tower and remote sensing work. She and Greg are also joining forces with the National Tropical Botanical Garden on Kauai to study the diversity of canopy biochemicals in tropical forest species from around the world.
Chris Carlson and Melissa Kunz are also joining Asner's lab this month as technicians. Chris will be based in the Stanford labs, and Melissa will be based in our Hawaii laboratories.
Below: Roland measuring fluorescence at the leaf level to compare with LIFT values.
June 14: Eben Broadbent writes from Lima, Peru that he has been admitted to a PhD program in Stanford's Dept. of Biological Sciences working in the Field lab. His interests are in dynamics of tropical ecosystems undergoing anthropogenic and climate related impacts, especially in Amazonia.
Eben's wife, Angelica Almeyda (Asner lab) having successfully passed her qualifications, is now a PhD candidate in the Dept. Anthropological Sciences and begins two years of field work for her dissertation.
This summer Angelica and Eben will be conducting two research projects in the tri-national frontier of the Brazilian, Bolivian and Peruvian Amazon. They will be working on: (1) land use impacts of small holders in the tri-national area and (2) looking into relationships among foliar nutrients and soil parameters along a 50 year chronosequence in a lowland forest in Pando, Bolivia.
Claire Lunch and the equipment she constructed to sample and measure net exchange of CO2 and water vapor.
Click on photos for enlargement.