Team Member: Natalie Pyrooz

Hello! I'm excited to spend the next couple of months in the Sonoran Desert with y'all in the desert bloom - admittedly even moreso because I just got a macro lens to shoot flowers and am not afraid to use it.

My background is mainly in botany, conservation, and sustainability and I absolutely love the work I've been so fortunate to do that has been within and crossed between these fields.

Wasting a nice day inside drives me crazy and I enjoy anything that gets me out and communing wth nature, I have a weakness for a hoppy microbrew, and my spirit likes to dance.

I just spent 8 months in Latin America and a couple of the coolest things I did include collecting a new species of Trimezia (Iridaceae) in Bolivia following the instructions, "find the yellow monocot along the road that leads to the seminary school...", and walking for 5 days in the rain to and through a town with no roads to cross the border from Argentina to Chile.

Oh, and Tecate and Arizona go hand in hand, like old friends.

Meet Joe Trudeau

Hey folks, I am Joe Trudeau. A few days ago Luke phoned me to offer me a position as Crew Leader for the upcoming field work. I accepted, graciously, and I am very excited to be involved in this project. Over the last ten years I have been a part of many meaningful and rewarding ecological research projects, and I am honored by the opportunity to work in this wild place with a new crew and new, intriguing goals and challenges. I believe we in the environmental sciences are blessed with experiences most will never have. I am thankful for these times, even with the catclaw scars, spider bites, calloused skin, and socks painfully choked with Brome seeds.

I live a few miles south of Prescott, Arizona in a cabin that is of comparable size to the oven Luke will use to dry our biomass samples. I love food, music, knowledge and soul-building. Plants have spoken to me. I enjoy administering first aid in traumatic situations. I'm not mad anymore that I'm going to get old someday. Like our lab-masters, I drink Tecate, climb big rocks, and eat food often. I can also get by without these things. One thing I can not get by without is our beautiful Earth.

Preliminary sampling

The light green callout balloons in this image indicate sites we sampled (targeting buffelgrass locations) back in October. You can see some of the photos we took during this excursion here: http://picasaweb.google.com/LZachmann/Tucson#.

Team member: Ophelia Wang

Hi I'm Ophelia. I joined our lab group as a postdoc doing remote sensing, GIS, and ecology work. I have a background in tropical plant ecology, Latin American Studies, and geography. I'm interested in biodiversity conservation.

I love Latin dance---especially New York style salsa and Argentine tango. I started my lessons in Urbana-Champaign, IL and had a lot opportunities to follow great instructors when I lived in Austin, TX. I enjoyed the dance communities very much!

Also I love traveling in a shoestring-backpacker style. As an active Couchsurfing member since 2007, I've done a lot of hosting and surfing in North, Central, and South America, as well as Asia. I try to travel overseas whenever I have a longer break.

I'm into exploring international cuisines and you'll see that I eat all the time. For example, check out what I tasted when I traveled in Asia in summer 2009. (What!!! I really ate THAT much last summer???)

Because every serious team needs a mascot

Sean Dean Toledo

A man who was engaged by the National Army of Colombia while poaching a campsite in a graveyard on a cross-country bike tour.... The sort of guy who enjoys acupuncture with cholla and straight shots of habanero sauce. It is my pleasure to introduce Sean Dean Toledo. This man embodies the spirit of the work we do. You'll likely see him in the field in February, wearing a field spectrometer, but looking like he just walked off the set of Ghostbusters.

The Sonoran Desert Research Program: Background

In recent decades, non-native plants have been invading the Sonoran Desert and Arizona landscapes, forever changing the natural beauty of Arizona deserts and creating serious threats, including the loss of native plants and animals (biodiversity). Many of these non-native invasive plant species have become particularly pervasive, also acting as substantial fuel sources that allow fires to spread more rapidly and become more costly and destructive in a region where fire was not historically common. In the last 8 years, Arizona has experienced fires of uncharacteristic size and severity, burning or destroying more than a million acres and costing taxpayers hundreds of millions of dollars. These are direct costs that include the actual costs to fight the fires, property damage and loss, and loss of income.

A new Sonoran Desert research program, coordinated by NAU faculty and made possible, in part, by a large grant from the U.S. Department of Defense (DoD), is an effort to address these costly threats. NAU researchers will be utilizing cutting-edge data collection methods and satellite technology to create computer models of current and future landscape conditions that will guide state and federal land managers and help shape public policy. The area being studied covers over 34,000 square miles; almost one third of the entire state of Arizona. It encompasses large expanses of the Sonoran Desert, and includes federal lands in Arizona used for testing and training activities by the DoD. In the past, these activities accidently have led to larger and more costly fires on and off DoD lands. By funding this project, the DoD is committed to researching sustainable land management practices that also will prevent devastating fires or changes to the natural environment. As part of the Sonoran Desert research program, multiple projects will take place over four years, including other research efforts investigating wildlife habitat quality and climate change scenarios. The problematic species targeted by these research efforts include African buffelgrass, red brome, Sahara mustard, Mediterranean grass, and arugula.

These projects are directed by three NAU faculty and include several research specialists, two postdoctoral fellows, three graduate students, and dozens of NAU undergraduates from the Flagstaff and Yuma campuses. Preliminary data collection began last fall (2010). The field work will continue beginning in late January and extending through March (2011).