Fire history and woody debris

This graph shows the contribution of decaying CWD generated each year by wildfire to an overall estimate of the fire-generated CWD decomposition flux in Canada. (That is, each color shows the carbon flux from a different year's cohort, and the top line shows the estimated total flux.) No pre-1959 national statistics are available, so I've assumed a constant fire rate before then, equal to the 1959-1999 mean.

You can see how the low-fire 1970s resulted in a decline in the overall flux, but then in the 1980s and 1990s some big fire years raised the overall annual flux to around 50 Tg.

From the department of unusual names

It's come to my attention that there's a tree canker named Neonectria fuckeliana. Question for my plant path friends: was this named by someone who was really pissed off at a woman named Eliana? Inquiring minds want to know!

Bohr

We are all agreed that your theory is crazy. The question that divides us is whether it is crazy enough to have a chance of being correct.

Niels Bohr

I'd like to come up with a suitably-crazy theory some day.

Worldwide soil respiration

Here's a map (estimated from a model, natch, but a model based on more data points than anyone has ever put together before). I am getting quite tired of soil respiration, but this has been a good project: one year from starting to assemble the database to (almost) a manuscript.

Oops, no scale! Will fix that.

The reshape function in R is very slow with large data sets. That is all.

In which I make a map

Soil respiration studies worldwide, color-coded by flux rate. I tried to insert an interactive google map with these data, but am still learning.

Wow. A million+ year-old ferrous ocean beneath a glacier.

And a good explanation of it here.

Why can't Xcode find my header file? Arrgh.

Soil respiration

The flux of carbon (mostly CO2) from the soil surface is about an order of magnitude larger than anthropogenic CO2 emissions, and is the second-largest flux in the terrestrial carbon cycle. This graph shows records in the Web of Science database about soil respiration, arbitrarily and approximately separated into "interesting" (field studies examining temperature response and/or fluxes over time) and "not interesting" (modeling, remote sensing, incubations, microbial response).

Snakes and Ladders

It turns out that Snakes and Ladders can be won in seven moves, but the probability of this is only 0.2%. The most common number of moves to win is 20 (3.6%), and 1.5% of the time you'll need more than 100 moves.