In 2017, Hurricane Maria ravaged the island of Puerto Rico, with category 5 winds topping out at 174 mph (282 km/h). In this mountainous nation with the 9th highest road density in the world, thousands of landslides wreaked havoc on the large number of rural communities that became cut off from supplies and travel. Dr. Stephen […] The post The 70,000-landslide storm appeared first on Environmental Biophysics ..read more

CONTRIBUTORS You’ve buried soil water content and water potential sensors in the ground, installed an ATMOS 41 in the field, and set up your ZL6 data logger. Your network of instruments has been collecting data for days, weeks, or even all season. Now what? Performing soil moisture data analysis for your research location is one thing. Knowing how to extrapolate meaningful inferences and conclusions to understand what is happening and troubleshoot issues is completely different. In this article, we will step through multiple data sets to understand how soil water content, soil temperature, so ..read more

CONTRIBUTORS You’ve buried soil water content and water potential sensors in the ground, installed an ATMOS 41 in the field, and set up your ZL6 data logger. Your network of instruments has been collecting data for days, weeks, or even all season. Now what? Performing soil moisture data analysis for your research location is one thing. Knowing how to extrapolate meaningful inferences and conclusions to understand what is happening and troubleshoot issues is completely different. Learn how to identify and understand behavior of soil moisture sensors in different soil types In this article, we w ..read more

There’s a lot to consider when collecting soil moisture measurements. Get your soil moisture questions answered in our Office Hours series. Join Environment Support Manager, Chris Chambers, and Director of Science Outreach, Leo Rivera, as they discuss submitted questions all about getting the best soil moisture measurements. In the full episode, they discuss:  How difficult is the calibration of dielectric sensors?  How does soilless media affect the operation of dielectric sensors?  How much can organic soil amendments influence soil moisture?  Is it possible to determine ..read more

University of Idaho graduate student, Adrianne Zuckerman, is taking a different approach to stream restoration than the traditional approach, channel manipulation, which often requires heavy equipment and major disruption to the riparian area. Zuckerman set out to understand how vegetation lining the stream bank impacts habitat quality for anadromous salmon and steelhead in Washington’s Methow River, which flows through the eastern Cascades. Zuckerman wanted to know how tree species composition affects the amount of nutrients available to the benthic insect community, since they are ..read more

What impact does direct solar radiation have on the overall radiation balance? Dr. Colin Campbell, WSU Environmental Biophysics professor and METER scientist, shows you how to do the calculations in our latest chalk talk. Transcript Hi, I’m Dr. Colin Campbell. And this is a METER Chalk Talk. Have you ever been outside on a hot day walking in the full sun and then stepped into the shade? The relief is almost immediate. And I was thinking about that a lot when I was looking at this graph here, the estimated crop water loss on one of my experiments. So this is an ET zero, meaning a reference ET ..read more

Listen to Dr. Colin Campbell, WSU environmental biophysics professor, as he discusses how to calculate the angle of the sun, or solar zenith angle. Transcription Hi, I’m Dr. Colin Campbell. And this is a METER Chalk Talk. A couple of years ago, I was heading out into the backcountry and we wanted to figure out what kind of gear we should take along. A friend suggested we should just check the wind chill factor. But when I looked into it, we found out that it doesn’t even consider solar radiation in that calculation. Our exchange of energy in the environment is highly dependent on radiation, p ..read more

Champions of water potential Drs. Kim Novick and Jessica Guo team up to discuss the vital role water potential measurement plays in both plant and soil sciences and the work they are doing to establish the first-of-its-kind nationwide water potential network. Join their discussion to understand how a communal knowledge of these measurements could impact what we know about climate change and ecology as a whole. A water potential measurement network could increase our understanding of climate change and ecology. Listen to the podcast→ Notes Dr. Kim Novick is a professor, Paul H. O’Neill Cha ..read more

Like a silent battle cry, plants call out to signal they are under siege as a warning to other plants and to call in reinforcements to fend off the invasion. Listen to research on pathogen infection, water stress, and how plants communicate and defend themselves. How does this communication work? What else are plants doing to protect themselves from disease and predators alike? In our latest podcast, Natalie Aguirre, a PhD candidate and plant physiology and chemical ecology researcher at Texas A&M University, dives into her research on pathogen infection, water stress, and how plants ..read more

As world water demand increases and supplies decrease, how can we turn more of the water we use for agriculture into biomass? In this webinar, Dr. Campbell dives deep into the measurement and implications of making the most of every drop of water. Learn how to measure the amount of water a crop will need. Crops turn sunlight, water, carbon dioxide, and nutrients into food The availability of those resources puts limitations on the amount of food a crop can produce. A previous webinar considered the limitations of sunlight. In this 30-minute webinar, world-renown environmental biophysicist ..read more