Congratulations to Laureano Gherardi on his recently published paper in Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences! Check out his paper on the effects of precipitation variability on grass- and shrub-productivity. Most studies on climate change impact focus on the effects of changes in the amount of precipitation in a system, overlooking the effects of interannual variability in precipitation. This 6-year study…
Check our paper on ecosystem services just published in Frontiers in Ecology and the Environment. Ecosystem services have been extensively studied in recent decades. Most of the thousands of scholarly papers published on the subject have focused on describing the production, spatial extent, and valuation of such services. Human reliance on ecosystem services is a function of ecosystems’ capacity to supply…
A new paper has come out from the Sala Lab in Oecologia. The paper entitled “Preference for different inorganic nitrogen forms among plant functional types and species of the Patagonian steppe” shows that shrubs and grasses absorb preferentially different forms of inorganic nitrogen. Grasses which have fibrous and shallow roots absorb inorganic N mainly as ammonium, which is the main…
A new paper from the Sala Lab published today in Ecology (see Publications)! Lara Reichmann is the lead author of this important work “Precipitation legacies in desert-grassland primary production occur through previous-year tiller density” that clearly showed the existence of legacies from previous years and documented the mechanism behind them. Legacies in aboveground net primary production were similar in absolute…
Congratulations Laureano on your new paper just published in Ecosphere!! This paper reports on a new system that alters precipitation for experimental plots from 80% reduction to 80% increase relative to ambient, is low cost, and is fully solar powered. This two-part system consists of a rainout shelter that intercepts water and sends it to a temporary storage tank, from…