Edmund E Grote
Science and Products
Drought & Grazing Experiment: Understanding Impacts and Identifying Mitigation Strategies
Drylands (sometimes called ‘deserts’ or ‘arid and semi-arid' ecosystems) are defined by water scarcity. Understanding how land-use activities may effect dryland ecosystems and dryland ecological processes is a high priority for land conservation and management. Grazing by domestic livestock (typically cattle but also sheep and goats) is the most widespread land-use in drylands globally and a...
Wind Erosion and Dust Emissions on the Colorado Plateau
Wind erosion of soils and dust emissions are a significant resource management challenge on the Colorado Plateau. Loss of topsoil and associated aeolian sediment (wind-driven sediment) movement can lead to reduced soil fertility as well as abrasion and burial of vegetation. Dust in the atmosphere poses a threat to human health, visual resources, and regional water supplies (due to interactions...
Long-Term Vegetation Change on the Colorado Plateau
The Colorado Plateau, centered around the four corners area of the Southwest, and includes much of Arizona, Utah, Colorado, and New Mexico, is a large and important component of U.S. drylands. This important home to mountains, desert basins, dramatic canyons, and arid woodlands and grasslands is also one of North America’s most rapidly warming hot spots, with rates of warming of up to 2-3° C...
Manufacturing simple and inexpensive soil surface temperature and gravimetric water content sensors
Quantifying temperature and moisture at the soil surface is essential for understanding how soil surface biota respond to changes in the environment. However, at the soil surface these variables are highly dynamic and standard sensors do not explicitly measure temperature or moisture in the upper few millimeters of the soil profile. This paper...
Howell, Armin J.; Tucker, Colin; Grote, Edmund E.; Veste, Maik; Belnap, Jayne; Kast, Gerhard; Weber, Bettina; Reed, Sasha C. Patterns of longer-term climate change effects on CO2 efflux from biocrusted soils differ from those observed in the short term
Biological soil crusts (biocrusts) are predicted to be sensitive to the increased temperature and altered precipitation associated with climate change. We assessed the effects of these factors on soil carbon dioxide (CO2) balance in biocrusted soils using a sequence of manipulations over a 9-year period. We warmed biocrusted soils by 2 and, later...
Darrouzet-Nardi, Anthony; Reed, Sasha C.; Grote, Edmund E.; Belnap, Jayne The concurrent use of novel soil surface microclimate measurements to evaluate CO2 pulses in biocrusted interspaces in a cool desert ecosystem
Carbon cycling associated with biological soil crusts, which occupy interspaces between vascular plants in drylands globally, may be an important part of the coupled climate-carbon cycle of the Earth system. A major challenge to understanding CO2 fluxes in these systems is that much of the biotic and biogeochemical activity occurs in the...
Tucker, Colin; McHugh, Theresa A.; Howell, Armin J.; Gill, Richard; Weber, Bettina; Belnap, Jayne; Grote, Edmund E.; Reed, Sasha C. Observations of net soil exchange of CO2 in a dryland show experimental warming increases carbon losses in biocrust soils
Many arid and semiarid ecosystems have soils covered with well-developed biological soil crust communities (biocrusts) made up of mosses, lichens, cyanobacteria, and heterotrophs living at the soil surface. These communities are a fundamental component of dryland ecosystems, and are critical to dryland carbon (C) cycling. To examine the effects of...
Darrouzet-Nardi, Anthony N.; Reed, Sasha C.; Grote, Edmund E.; Belnap, Jayne