Tyler Turk Shrub encroachment into arid grasslands is a widespread phenomenon in drylands globally and the Chihuahuan desert specifically. Encroachment leads to structural and functional changes in the system which facilitate positive feedback loops that further reinforce the shrubland state. Large bare interspaces serve as areas in which wind and water erosion can act, redistributing […]

Seth Burruss Biocrust are a diverse community of organisms comprising (cyanobacteria, algae, bacteria, and fungi) and macroscopic (lichens, mosses, and microarthropods).  They exist in top few centimeters of the soils surface predominantly in drylands and their community structures can vary greatly in heterogeneity.  Biocrust are estimated to cover 40-100% of the ground surface in drylands

William Beamon, Gesuri Ramirez, Libia Gonzalez-Alonso, Robin Luna, Alina Jaimes, Craig Tweedie, Marguerite Mauritz In desert ecosystems the appearance of greenness in plants signifies the presence of adequate temporal and spatial resources along with tolerance of the desert climate that allows for cellular respiration and development through phenological events.  The duration of a plants phenological

Kathleen Schaeffer Prior to the 19th century, much of the Chihuahuan Desert was made up of perennial desert grasslands, however these grasslands have been greatly reduced by shrub encroachment, which has ultimately led to the shrub dominated landscapes we see today. In the early 2000s, local land managers began implementing large scale shrub removal that

Ifeanyi H. Nwigboji1, Marguerite Mauritz-Tozer1, Sergio A. Vargas-Zesati1, Craig E. Tweedie1 1System Ecology Lab, University of Texas at El Paso, El Paso Texas To understand ecosystem change over a range of spatial and temporal scales and levels of biological organization and interaction, multiple streams of ecological data need to be collected, integrated, and analyzed. However,