News

Aimee and Olivia headed down to Washington DC this week to meet up with our collaborators and present our work on the impacts of advanced snowmelt on ecosystem function. Aimee gave a plenary talk titled “Temporal and spatial variation in the drivers of ecosystem processes” highlighting the work the lab globally looking at ecosystem responses…

The Classen and Sanders Lab headed north for the weekend to take in winter at the Biostation. We spent time crafting a lab mission statement and having focused writing time as well as discussing our favorite books, music, and things to do around Michigan, all by the comfort of the wood stove. We also got…

Our snowpack sensor has been piquing the interest of many people across the midwest! Check out the series media coverage about our research. “Biological Station’s snowpack sensors help study changing winters” -University Record “Snow science: How snowpack affects soil and summer plant growth” -MLive “Less snow is impacting local ecosystems” -13 Action News, Toledo “UMich…

The snow just keeps on coming up at the biostation! Luckily our snow sensor is up and running. Thanks to the Digital Water Lab, we can monitor our snowpack data on a live dashboard. If this winter is anything like past years, we expect the snowpack to stay until spring. This likely won’t be the…

At the end of November we installed a high frequency snow depth sensor at UMBS! This simple setup uses a low cost sonic rangefinder to monitor the distance between the bottom of the sensor and the ground beneath it. As snow accumulates, that distance will decrease there for giving us snow depth data. The sensor…

April and Karin visited the biostation last week to deploy 125 bracken fern litter bags. These will stay out over the winter and collection will start in the spring. We will monitor mass loss in the bags to understand trends in bracken decomposition across a natural gradient of understory bracken density. We also deployed a…