"Secret life of the Sonoran Desert" featuring Ferran Garcia-Pichel

Ira Flatow's Talk of the Nation (Science Friday), from NPR. Listen here:

Tiny forests in the Utah desert

Mi amiga Sasha Reed on a short PRX radio piece by Jennifer Jarret about biological crusts, dust, etc. Piece Description From Arches National Park, we get a close-up view of a living groundcover called "biological soil crust." This groundcover, made up of tiny organisms like mosses, lichens and cyanobacteria, helps to stablize the soil surface; "holding the place in place." It is extremely resilient to wind and water, but particularly sensitive to compressive forces like stepping or driving on the crust. Once disturbed by these kinds of compressive forces, the soil -- the place -- can start to blow away. This kind of destruction is not unike deforestation; just...smaller. Listen as Dr. Sasha Reed, a research ecologist with the U.S. Geological Survey, explains why seemingly localized impacts to Utah's crust communities have much greater implications for the western U.S. Reed was awarded the Presidentai Early Career Award for Scientists and Engineers in 2011. Public Radio Exchange is an online marketplace for distribution, review, and licensing of public radio programming. PRX is also a growing social network and community of listeners, producers, and stations collaborating to reshape public radio

I was on the radio....sort of

Photo: KNAU radio, photographer unknown. Ain't it cool? Notice the gradient in architecture that coincides with soil depth. There is a real sweet spot in soil depth about 10 - 50 cm away from the bedrock exposure. Also notice all the trapped sand in the microcanyons.

I recently chatted with a writer (Cecile Leblanc) for Earth Notes, a series of radio shorts broadcast on KNAU, an NPR station in Northern Arizona. Apparently, the editor had attended the crust session at the Biennial Conference for research on the Colorado Plateau, discussed in previous posts. He was intrigued by one of the talks, probably Jayne's, specifically about possible crust effects on plants. Anyways that led to a phone call and interview with Cecile. She summarized our conversation in this short. She focused on the possible good effects of crusts on plants, rather than the "crusts as germination barrier" or "crusts as competitors" views, but I think that's reasonable in a Colorado Plateau context.

I can't figure out how to embed this one...but here's a link.