Lab News

RECENT NEWS:
September 2026: Chandra Rai, PhD collaborator and friend of the lab) had his work with our lab described in This Week from AGU: https://news.agu.org/9-10-2026-forests-are-marching-uphill-potentially-destabilizing-soil-carbon-in-their-wake/

September 2026: PI Beard is headed to Iceland to start her four month work as a Fulbright-NSF Scholar in Reykjavik. She will be working on the effects of herbivores on Arctic ecosystems.

August 2026: PI Beard was quoted in Maui News for an article about how containing coquis has become a colossal challenge. Her research highlighting the potential ecological impacts of coquis if they continue to spread is mentioned.

August 2026: Welcome, Jeremy Johnson, who is a new MS student in our lab. Jeremy is working on potential acoustic deterrents for coqui frogs in Hawaii. His work is funded by the Hawaii Invasive Species Council.

August 2026: MS student, Kaitlyn Purington, presents her research on how climate variables may affect western toads in Utah at SWPARC in St. George, Utah. She earned 2nd place for best student presentation! Congratulations, Kaitlyn!

July 2026: PhD student, Emily Santos, presented a late-breaking poster at ESA in Salt Lake City on how warming, flooding and herbivory are disrupting above- and belowground processes in coastal Alaskan wetlands.

April 2026: Tyler Williams successfully defends her MS thesis. Congratulations, Tyler! Defense Talk: "Contrasting Plant Community Responses but Consistent Greenhouse Gas Emissions Under Warming, Flooding, and Herbivory in Two Arctic Wetlands"

RECENT PRESENTATIONS:
August 2026: Kaitlyn Purington presented results at SWPARC in St. George, Utah: "Interannual Climate Variability and Survival of
Western Toads in Northwestern Utah" - and won 2nd place for Student Presentations

July 2026: Emily Santos, presented her research at ESA in Salt Lake City. "How do warming, flooding, and herbivory restructure above-belowground trait coordination in high latitude ecosystems"

Past lab post-doc, Matteo Petit Bon, presented his research at the Icelandic Ecological meeting in Reykjavik, April 2026: Petit Bon, M., K.C. Kelsey, A.J. Leffler, K.H. Beard. "Trait plasticity drives rapid plant functional responses of coastal tundra to flooding and warming"

Lab collaborators present at AGU in New Orleans, December 2025:
Bricker, C., K.H. Beard, A.J. Leffler, M. Petit Bon, and K.C. Kelsey. "Carbon fluxes and plant traits respond more to sedimentation than salinity change in a high-latitude wetland"

Kelsey, K.C., A.J. Leffler, M. Petit Bon, C. Bricker, M. DiCianna, and K.H. Beard. "Flooding and warming drive more complex greenhouse gas responses in an Arctic coastal wetland than adjacent coastal tundra"

Lab collaborators present at ITEX meeting in Sweden 2025:
Leffler, A.J., J.M. Ross, K.C. Kelsey, M. Petit Bon, K.H. Beard. "Flooding has little impact on soil respiration and methanogenesis responses to temperature in high latitude wetlands and tundra"

Kelsey, K.C., A.J. Leffler, M. Petit Bon, and K.H. Beard. "Warming and flooding influence CO₂ and CH₄ emissions differently in arctic coastal wetland and tundra landscapes"

RECENT PUBLICATIONS:
August 2026: PhD student, Chandra Rai (collaborator and friend of the lab), published his first chapter. Congratulations, Chandra!
Rai, C., A. Miller, K.H. Beard, A. Kulmatiski, J.M. Norton, Y. Zhou. Stable to labile: Forest expansion drives changes in alpine soil carbon fractions. Journal of Geophysical Research: Biogeosciences. 131(8): e2026JG009751. doi: 10.1029/2026JG009751

August 2026: Past lab collaborator/post-doc Jaron Adkins had a paper accepted to Functional Ecology's Species Feature: The Mechanisms Underpinning Zoogeochemistry. Great job, Jaron!
Adkins, J., B.G. Waring, K.H. Beard, T. Saunders, R. Choi, E. Chavez, L. Miller, E. Hammill, and T.B. Atwood. Goose herbivory alters soil microbial community functional potential in a sub-Arctic wetland. Functional Ecology. doi: 10.1111/1365-2435.70430.

March 2026: PI Beard is part of a Drought-net paper in Nature Ecology and Evolution: SJ Worthy, JC Luong, BE Wainwright, and the IDE contributors. Growth form and lifespan of herbaceous species mediate the role of traits in short-term drought response.

April 2026: Past MS student on our NSF project, Jenna Ross, published her thesis research in Biogeochemistry titled: Climate change-related effects on carbon emissions and net ammonification across lowland to upland soils from a high-latitude coastal ecosystem. Way to go, Jenna!

March 2026: Past undergraduate lab research and field technician, Cristina Chirvasa, first-authored a manuscript about her research in Oecologia titled: Rapid plant functional trait responses to warming, flooding, and herbivory in high-latitude coastal wetlands