2025 Symposium

Saturday, November 1 2025
Integrated Learning Center, Room 150, University of Arizona


Presentations

Time Speaker(s) Title
8:30 - 9:00 Registration
9:00 - 9:10 Mitch McClaran
UA SNRE & AES
 RISE Welcome
9:10 - 9:30 Abe Karam
NEON Domain 14 Mgr 		Updates and opportunities with NEON the National Ecological Observatory Network
9:35 - 9:55 Brett Blum
UA AES Director 		Updates and opportunities at the Santa Rita Experimental Range
10:00 - 10:20 Amber Morin
Fort Huachuca Sentinel Landscape 		Sentinal Landscape Program in the Southwest
10:25 - 10:45 Rebecca Kariuki
SOS ASU		 Land Use Change and Stakeholder Engagement in Global Rangelands
10:50 - 11:10 Steve Prager
Director, A-W Research Ranch		 Science, Conservation, and Community on the Appleton-Whittell Research Ranch of the National Audubon Society
11:15 - 11:35 Flavie Audoin
SNRE UA		 International Year of Rangelands and Pastoralist
11:40 - 12:00 Tristan Goulden
NEON		 Opportunities with the NEON Airborne Observation Platform
12:00 - 12:15 Poster Introductions Presenters give a 1-minute advertisement of their poster
12:00 - 1:45 Poster Session Lunch w/ Posters Provided at the meeting; included in RISE registration
1:50 - 2:10 Valerie Trouet
LTRR UA 		Tree Story: The History of the World Written in Rings
2:15 - 2:35 Shang Gao
SNRE UA 		Parsing Post-Fire Recovery: A High-Resolution Look at Climate and Grazing Effects on Rangelands
2:40 - 3:00 Theresa Crimmins
NPN SNRE UA 		A Field in Full Bloom: From Volunteer Observations to Critical Climate Science
3:10 Poster Awards

Posters

(*=graduate, **=undergraduate in poster contest)

Number Lead Author Title
1 Ben Yang Plant–Microbe Interactions Driving Invasion: Insights from Metabolomics and Amplicon Sequencing
2 Angie Abarzúa Muñoz Linking Soil Properties and Ecosystem Productivity in Drylands Environments of the Southwestern United States
3 Lindsey Bell Productivity Does Not Scale With Canopy Density: Linking Ecosystem Structure to Function at Two Dryland Flux Sites
4 Isabel L. Torres Litter decomposition in drylands of North America: Using identified microsites to inform a large-scale litterbag study
5 Alexi C. Besser Quantifying Plant Litter Distribution across North American Drylands
6 Madeleine Wallace Tracking Vegetation Changes from 1953 to 2024: Climate, Composition, and Richness on the Santa Rita Experimental Range
7 Brian Nguyen Increasing Soil H2 Uptake Through Bioaugmentation
8
9 Allelua Niyokwizera Long-Term Effects of Litter Manipulation on Soil Carbon and Nitrogen in a Semi-Arid Grassland–Shrubland
10 Cynthia Libantino Norton Grazing and Topoedpahic Impacts on Woody Cover Species Dynamics
11 Alessandra Gorlier Interannual Stability of Species Richness on the Santa Rita Experimental Range Despite a 10% Difference in Taxa Between Years
12 T. Mohammad Hybrid phenological modeling: Combining chill-heat dynamics with machine learning in redbud (Cercis canadensis)
13 Ameng Zou Machine-Learning Optimized Estimation of Rainfall Erosivity Using IMERG Precipitation Data
14 Fehmida Rafi Evaluating the Impact of Wildfire on Runoff using Automated Geospatial Watershed Assessment (AGWA) Tool: A Case Study of Eaton Fire, Los Angeles, California
Research Insights in Semiarid Ecosystems
RISE Organizing Committee:

Brett Blum, Phil Heilman, Mitch McClaran, Heather Throop (alphabetical)

bcb@arizona.edu
phil.heilman@usda.gov
mcclaran@u.arizona.edu
heather.throop@asu.edu 

Acronyms:
  • AES: Arizona Experiment Station
    AIR: Arizona Institute for Resilience
  • ARS: Agricultural Research Service
  • NEON: National Ecological Observatory Network
  • SAES: Southern Arizona Experiment Station
  • SNRE: School of Natural Resources and the Environment
    SRER: Santa Rita Experimental Range
  • SWRC: Southwest Watershed Research Center
  • UA: University of Arizona
    UO BIO: Univ Oklahoma School Biological Sciences
  • USDA: United States Department of Agriculture
    USGS: United States Geological Survey