This is a past event.

Title: Fire as a new entry in the disturbance regime of a desert stream ecosystem

Description: Research in Sycamore Creek, Arizona has long focused on resilience to the disturbances of flooding and drying, but recently a wildfire burned half of the Sycamore Creek watershed. In this talk, I will review our understanding of resilience in streams and other ecosystems and the responses of this arid land stream to drought and flood disturbances. I will introduce a new conceptual framework for the impacts of fire on aridland stream biogeochemistry and discuss preliminary findings from the study of this new disturbance in Sycamore Creek.

Bio: NANCY B. GRIMM is an ecosystem ecologist who studies the interactions of climate change, human activities, resilience, and biogeochemical processes in urban and stream ecosystems. Grimm was founding director of the Central Arizona–Phoenix LTER, co-directed the Urban Resilience to Extremes Sustainability Research Network, and now co-directs the NATURA and ESSA networks, all focused on solving problems of the Anthropocene, especially in cities. Grimm’s research centers on nature-based, technological, and governance solutions that can build resilience to a future with increased frequency and magnitude of extreme events. In streams, she studies how hydrologic and climatic variability influence ecosystem processes such as stream metabolism and nutrient dynamics, and more recently, the impacts of a novel desert disturbance (wildfire) on stream processes through hydrologic connectivity of upland to stream-riparian corridor. Grimm is Past President of the Ecological Society of America and the Society for Freshwater Science, and Fellow of the American Association for the Advancement of Science, the American Geophysical Union, the Ecological Society of America, the Society for Freshwater Science. She is a member of the National Academy of Sciences and has made >250 contributions to the scientific literature with colleagues and students.