When: Tuesday, September 6, 2011 at 4:30 p.m.
Where: Wrigley Hall, Room 481

Come join us to kick off a new year of CAP LTER activities! We will have a brief program introducing the CAP LTER project and go over how you can get involved, followed by an informal paper discussion and ample opportunities for you to talk about urban research with other students and faculty. We look forward to seeing new graduate students at this event as well as ongoing CAP collaborators. Feel free to contact your CAP graduate student representatives for more information: Julie Ripplinger or Eric Chapman.

Followed by CAPpy Hour at Dave’s Electric Brewpub at 5:30 p.m.!

CAP LTER scientists are currently conducting the Phoenix Area Social Survey (PASS) in 45 metropolitan Phoenix neighborhoods. The survey, conducted every five years, focuses on the quality of life in Phoenix area neighborhoods and four areas of environmental quality in the Valley: water, land, air, and climate. Past surveys have yielded important results about attitudes and environmental behaviors in metropolitan Phoenix.

Eleven ASU graduate students are winners of the spring 2011 CAP Graduate Grants. CAP makes these $4000.00 awards on a competitive basis to graduate students who submit outstanding proposals for CAP-related research. A panel of previous grant winners reviews each application and makes funding recommendations to CAP’s Director, Dan Childers, who makes the final funding decisions in consultation with the CAP Executive Committee.

Notable among this year’s winners are three joint research studies, indicating the interest among students in collaborative research. Funding from all of these spring 2011 awards will allow grantee graduate students to conduct important research over the summer months and into the next academic year.

There are two competitions per year for CAP Graduate Grants. The next competition will commence in October 2011, and competition announcements will be circulated to the CAP community via e-mail.

The spring 2011 award winners and the titles of their research are:

Jeff Ackley, “Does the urban heat island impact desert lizards?”

Yevgeniy Marusenko and Karl Wyant, “Dynamics of urban biogeochemical cycling coupled with the interactions between soil microbial communities, the belowground food web, and land-use type in an arid ecosystem”

Shai Kaplan and Chao Fan, “Actual evapotranspiration estimation for different land use and land cover in a desert city: Sensitivity to drought”

Patricia Trubl, “The ecology of the Western black widow spider, Latrodectus hesperus, along a desert-urban continuum: From desert loner to urban pest”

Christopher Gallati and John Connors, “Characterizing spatial structure in Phoenix and its implications for
ecosystem services”

Genevieve Metson, “Drivers of change in the urban-agricultural interface and their impact on phosphorus dynamics: A long-term study of Maricopa County, Arizona”

Scott Robinson, “Fingerprinting urban sediment sources in Indian Bend Wash with implications for nutrient cycling in an artificial lake chain”

Alex Hamilton, “Soil organic and black carbon concentration, photo-oxidation, and chemical functionality of central Arizona surface and sub-surface soil”

Charles Redman, Nancy Grimm, and Linda Williams were honored for their contributions to CAP LTER at the 13^th Annual CAP LTER All Scientists Meeting and Poster Symposium on January 12, 2011.

Redman and Grimm served as CAP LTER co-directors from 1997-2010. Current CAP Director Dan Childers presented them with plaques honoring their years of leadership and scholarly contributions to urban socioecological research. Williams was the grant manager for CAP LTER from 1997-2010. Former co-directors Redman and Grimm saluted her contributions to CAP and presented her with a gift reflecting gratitude for her steady management of the research program’s finances.

The CAP LTER Poster Symposium on January 13^th featured 23 posters with graduate and undergraduate student authors, which a panel judged during the Symposium. Congratulations to Melanie Banville and co-author Heather Bateman for their winning poster, Herpetofauna and microhabitat characteristics of urban and wildland reaches along the Salt River, Arizona. Runners-up were Brian Sovik, A spatial-temporal representation of land subsidence in the northwest Phoenix valley, Arizona and J. Mac Gifford and Paul Westerhoff, Making biofuel renewable: Recovering phosphorus from residual biomass

Copies of all symposium posters can be found on the CAP LTER website.

The local ABC News affiliate interviewed CAP LTER scientists Tony Brazel and Darren Ruddell for a story on the impact of climate change on Arizona’s cities, deserts, and forests. Their comments focused on the exacerbation of the urban heat island and the impacts of this on human health and well-being.

The Fall 2010 edition of the Network News is now available online.

CAP LTER will hold its Thirteenth Annual Poster Symposium and All Scientists Meeting on January 12-13, 2011 in the Arizona Ballroom of the Memorial Union on the Arizona State University Tempe campus. For a detailed agenda, please click here.

 The Central Arizona–Phoenix Long-Term Ecological Research Project (CAP LTER) is hosting its Thirteenth Annual All Scientists Meeting (Poster Symposium) to discuss current research and promote future research on urban socio-ecological systems. It will be held in the Memorial Union at the Arizona State University Tempe campus on Wednesday, January 12 and Thursday, January 13, 2011. Thursday, January 13^th will be the date of the poster presentations.

We are particularly interested in posters that present interdisciplinary approaches to understanding urban systems and posters that represent university-community partnerships. We encourage our community partners, faculty, staff and students to participate by presenting posters and attending the symposium.

Please submit your abstract electronically by December 3, 2010 to Cindy Zisner. The abstract should be single-spaced, 12-point font size, no more than 250 words in length, and in Word or WordPerfect format (no pdfs please). Final posters will need to be provided electronically for the CAP LTER web site. Posters need not be submitted by the abstract deadline but should be submitted as close to the Symposium as possible. Posters often are sized 3 x 5 ft (h x w), but the primary space consideration will be that the final product fits on a 4 x 8 ft (h x w) tack board.

This year, poster presenters will be expected to make short, < 5 minute presentations to the symposium audience before their poster session commences. More details on this will be circulated in advance of the symposium.

We award prizes to the best student posters in the symposium. Indicate on your abstract if the lead author is a student. Please provide all of your authors’ names and addresses so that these can be included in the program. For more information contact Marcia Nation.