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 Seventy Years of Change: Climate and Vegetation Dynamics on the Santa Rita Experimental Range
7 Brian Nguyen Increasing Soil H2 Uptake Through Bioaugmentation
8** Doane Goolsby Significant Overlap in Niche of Fire-promoting Invasive Species Threatens Biodiversity of Sonoran and Madrean Archipelago Ecoregions
9 Allelua Niyokwizera Long-Term Effects of Litter Manipulation on Soil Carbon and Nitrogen in a Semi-Arid Grassland–Shrubland
10* Cynthia Libantino Norton Assessing Shrub Species Distributions with Aerial Imagery Under Differing Grazing and Topographic Conditions
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