First day of Research

Today Erin and I went to meet Russ and the team we will be working with for the summer. We will be working with two other employees of ARS (Agricultural Research Service): Michelle and Erik.

Michelle just received her Master's from the U of A and decided to stick around for the rest of the summer. She did her work on plant respiration using sap flow as her main indicator. The project we will be doing this summer is very similar to her Master's work. We will be studying two sites, a mesquite savanna and a shrub land and measuring the sap flow (both horizontally and vertically). The idea behind this is that the sap is composed mostly of water thus knowing the movement of the sap allows us to determine transpiration from the plant.

Erik comes with 8 years of experience teaching at Rutgers, and decided to move out to Arizona to join the ARS team. He studies gas exchange on an individual plot scale (i.e. small scale). We spent far less time with Erik so I don't know as much about the work we will be doing with him, but I will say he kind of reminds me of the professor from "Back to the Future" in the way he thinks, so I'm kind of looking forward to that.

Today Michelle, Erin, and I worked on prepping the sensors for the field, i.e. a lot of repetition. Essentially, we had to strip small wires, twist the wires together, and then solder them. Once the wires were ready, we attached them to a piece of foam that will be wrapped around the base of the plant and three wires will be connected to the plant (one to the stem, one to the root, and one horizontal with the system we created on the foam). This is what we will use to measure transpiration.

Tomorrow will be very similar to today (i.e. more prep work), but we will be out in the field on Thursday. Right now the goal is to be in the field 1 day a week, at ARS 2-3 days a week, and working on a project(s) at the Biosphere 2 the rest of the time. We are also hoping to meet Dr. Huxman later this week, but I have a feeling it might be put off till early next week.

Also, I keep hearing about this elusive Arizona monsoon...so I'm definitely looking forward to actually seeing that. Apparently there are some really spectacular thunderstorms that come in the area.