804: Studying How Dryland Ecosystems Respond to Changes in Water Availability - Dr. Andrew Felton
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Hi, everyone. This is your People Behind the Science podcast host, Dr. Marie McNeely, and I'm excited to have you here with us for episode 804 with our guest, Dr. Andrew Felton. If you want to learn more about our show, check out past episodes, find our recommended book list and more. Visit us at peoplebehindthescience.com. And listeners, we have another excellent conversation on the way from today's guest. So get ready to meet another one of our remarkable people behind the science podcast.

The Science. Every day, discoveries are made that will change our understanding of the world around us. Dr. Marie McNeely is here to bring you the brilliant minds who are making these discoveries so they can share their incredible stories and take you on an amazing journey. Welcome to People Behind the Science. ♪

Hello, everyone, and welcome to People Behind the Science. Today, I am thrilled to be speaking with our guest researcher, Dr. Andrew Felton. So, Andrew, welcome to the show today. How are you?

I'm great. Thanks so much for having me. This is exciting. Well, we are delighted to have you with us. I'm looking forward to learning more about you and more about the work that you do, but perhaps we'll start with a general introduction. So listeners, Andrew is an assistant professor in the Department of Land Resources and Environmental Sciences within the College of Agriculture at Montana State University, Bozeman, where he is the principal investigator of the Felton Lab.

He completed his bachelor's degree at the University of Minnesota, majoring in biology, society and environment.

Afterwards, Andrew was awarded his Ph.D. in ecology from Colorado State University, and next he worked as a postdoctoral research scientist at Utah State University, and subsequently he was awarded a U.S. Department of Agriculture National Institute of Food and Agriculture, or USDA-NIFA, postdoctoral fellowship that he conducted at Chapman University before joining the faculty at Montana State University where he is today. An

And Andrew, today we're excited to get to know you as a scientist, of course, but also more generally as a person. So can you tell us what do you like to do when you're not doing science?

I live in Bozeman, Montana in the Intermountain West of the United States. So I really try to take advantage of that and where I live. So I really enjoy skiing. The snow has been good this year. Downhill skiing's really fun out here. I really enjoy rock climbing and just getting out to all the really incredible areas in the region. You can drive an hour from where we are and be in Yellowstone and then you drive an hour

drive through Yellowstone to get to the Tetons and then just really experiencing those areas. And I just find them kind of inspirational, really, just by how beautiful they are. I also love other more normal things, if you will. I really love music, like guitar, since I was about 13.

They've got good coffee here. I really like drinking coffee. Doesn't matter the context. And something that I didn't really enjoy doing growing up, but that I really enjoy now is reading. So I'm always trying to read a really interesting book. And then eating. I love eating. I don't know if that's an unusual trait, but going out to fun places to eat and spending time with friends and family too.

Well, that all sounds wonderful. I think we have a lot in common. I, too, love eating. Do you have a favorite food or a favorite place that you like to go? Well, it's hard to beat tacos, I'll be honest. I lived in Texas for a year and that was pretty eye-opening. I mean, shout out to Torchy's Tacos. And they had Torchy's in Colorado where I did my PhD. But man, I would default to tacos. I

I don't know what you think about that. Excellent choice. I support this. Well, you have a lot of different hobbies. Perhaps we'll dig into reading as well. We love talking about books on this show and giving our listeners recommendations for what they should be putting on their bookshelf and picking up next. So, Andrew, do you have a favorite book that you'd like to recommend for everybody or perhaps just one that you've read recently and really enjoyed?

like an old classic and a newer one. So I drift towards nonfiction biographies in history. I'll caveat it that way. I really like the biographies that Walter Isaacson writes about. So he's written about Ben Franklin, Henry Kissinger, Leonardo da Vinci. But my favorite one is the one about Steve Jobs.

I'm not some super big Apple fan or anything like that. It's just a very interesting perspective on the personal computer revolution. You can kind of bookend that revolution with his life beginning at essentially one of the first personal computers, the Apple I, at the beginning. And then you see the evolution towards the end where we have mobile computing with the iPhone. It just has an interesting life and story arc. And...

Being a scientist in a lab, running a lab is a bit entrepreneurial in itself.

So I thought all that was very interesting. So that's like an old classic, the Steve Jobs, Walter Isaacson biography. And then what I'm reading right now is Tony Fauci's autobiography called On Call. And I think that is interesting because the type of position he held as a scientist, physician that strongly interfaced with public policy was fascinating.

It was fascinating. So a lot of his life was colored by trying to combat the AIDS epidemic. So he's walking me through that and how that went and really the progress over time. So you can tell I have a type of book I like to read, but those are the two that I'd recommend for like an older one and

and a newer one. Well, excellent recommendations, Andrew. I too like these biographies where you can kind of get in to understand what people were thinking at the time or what people were doing out of the spotlight that you didn't get to see in kind of the news headlines. So yeah, yeah, definitely. Excellent recommendations. Listeners, we'll put these up on our website for you to find. And Andrew, I feel like this is something scientists get asked a lot. This big question of what do you do at work?

And it's not always easy to answer. So how do you describe what you do to someone who's outside of your field or perhaps outside of science altogether?

Well, I could answer that one of two ways. So I can focus on the research, but in my position, a lot of people are surprised as an assistant professor at a research university, what we call a R1 university is the designation, high research activity. I kind of have three tenets of my job. And when I say I'm a professor, the default for anybody is to ask what I teach. So teaching is about a third of my time, actually. The majority of my time is research.

So how I spend my days changes, but I teach two classes. Right now I teach a data science course for environmental scientists and also a project-based capstone for seniors. So that's really fun. But the majority of my time is focused on research. And that involves running a research lab in

and directing that lab, such as through the development of grants to pull in funding. And my research is really focused on studying a certain type of ecosystem called dry lands. These are systems like desert grasslands, shrublands, that they're functioning, the types of plants and animals that are there are largely dictated by the scarcity of water.

So my research program, if you want to think about it that way, a program is really premised on understanding how water limited systems respond to variability and changes in water availability. So climate change is expected to change the size of precipitation events. It's increasing evaporation through higher temperatures.

So I want to understand what are the implications of those changes for how these already water limited systems look and function into the future? Very interesting. And I think that's a really accessible way to describe your work, something that people can kind of make this connection and relate to, which I think is important.

And you mentioned earlier that you really draw inspiration from nature and the outdoors. And I love talking about inspiration and motivation on our show as well, because I think there are difficult days in science and life in general, of course. So do you have a favorite motivational quote or a saying or just something that really keeps you going in every day, Andrew?

There's so many good ones, right? I default to this quote, and I think it was originally from a pastor or something, but it's about this idea of life is 10% of what happens to you and 90% of how you react or respond. And

And we can debate the percentages there, but the broader message is that how you respond to events in your life can dictate a lot of how you move forward. And then that also feeds into broader themes in science, right, about this need to be resilient because rejection is just like a common feature of being a scientist.

So I try to keep that in mind when faced with different challenges, whether it be peer review or engagement.

experiments not really working to try to have a cool head. I feel like maybe I benefit a bit from being the Midwest of the U.S. where we sometimes have a more stoic perspective on things, but that's definitely one that I try to keep in mind. Well, I love this idea. And I think now perhaps more than ever, this idea that how you respond to things in many circumstances is the only thing that you can control. So really putting your effort and your energy there.

Yeah, I was going to mention that. I mean, that's another way to think about it, too. It's focus on the things that you can control because of the fact of the matter is a lot of things going on around you and that may impact your life.

bit out of your control. So definitely connects to that for sure. Absolutely. And I think in science, some of the things that you can control are reaching out and making these connections with role models, mentors, colleagues, and peers, people who can really help lift you up in your career. So Andrew, when you look at your own career path, were there particular people who served as mentors and role models and really helped you get to where you are today? Oh, absolutely. I

As I develop in my own position running a lab, I keep that in mind that a lot of my success or progress forward in my profession has been a result of really great mentors. So I was pretty lucky. Not everybody has this experience to come into a lab during my PhD and have that develop into a really strong collaborative relationship. I found a lifelong mentor and

colleague as well in science. So definitely my PhD advisor, Mindy Smith over at Colorado State University is one of the first people that comes to mind. And she definitely leads by example. She's a workhorse, super creative, provided so many opportunities for me.

When I graduated college, undergrad, I was about to go live on a research station or something for the summer in North Dakota. And then I got kind of this opportunity to do a PhD over in Colorado and I took it and wow, here we are. She's a really strong colleague. So my PhD advisor, I've been lucky to have as a great mentor and now colleague. And I was further lucky that that sort of dynamic was consistent for my postdoctoral years as well.

Certainly. And I think it's wonderful that you mentioned that these connections often continue these collegial relationships, if you will, continue after you're completed with your training. These people are now your peers, your colleagues, your collaborators, people who you're working with in the field. And I think that's one of the wonderful things about science as well. So let's maybe take it back to the beginning, Andrew, if you could maybe give us some insight into how you first got interested in science to begin with.

I wasn't one of those kids who just loved nature. You know, I'm an ecologist, so that implies my research strongly involves perhaps being outside in nature and all that. But I did not grow up in the suburbs of the Twin Cities of Minnesota having a strong affinity for the outdoors initially. What really got me fascinated was a book that I read. It's called The Song of the Dodo by David Quammen, who in

incidentally lives in Bozeman, but it weaved together an understanding of the theory of natural selection, along with the story of Alfred Wallace and Darwin and their convergent paths towards making this realization that all this biodiversity that we see was underpinned by a common mechanism, natural selection.

They both almost simultaneously came to that conclusion. So the book weaves back and forth from current day efforts of research, largely through the context of island biogeography and conservation, all the way back to the 1800s, where Darwin and Wallace are on their journeys.

But I just found that fascinating, both from the storytelling angle and also that in ways that I hadn't been exposed to, it provided a really tangible explanation for something that's incredibly fascinating. And that's just all this biological diversity that we have. So that got me thinking, well, maybe I want to study biodiversity. So in college, I got my first internship at the Cedar Creek Biological Station, which has, I believe, the longest running biodiversity experiment in the world.

But it wasn't a glamorous internship. I weeded plots eight hours a day. Oh, wow. Because they wanted specific species in their experimental plots. I sat in the summer sun and I weeded plots. So in retrospect, it's a small miracle that I persisted through

to continue on because that doesn't sound too fun. Right. The first impression was weak. Yeah. Lightning really struck when I got a fellowship in undergrad and was able to do my own independent research. And that's when it clicked for me that, oh, this is really cool. I'm kind of guiding this production of knowledge.

And before that, I had taken a writing-intensive plant biology class. So these things were starting to get integrated where it's like, well, I really enjoy writing and I'm pretty good at it. And also, I really enjoy thinking of research and conducting it. So from there...

I applied to a PhD and got in to the ecology program at Colorado State and focused on grassland ecology. I spent my summers over at the Konza Prairie Biological Station in eastern Kansas, understanding how extreme weather conditions impact how that grassland functions. And then things just built from there.

During my postdoc, I did similar types of work, but then using satellite data sets. So here I am trying to integrate those tools with field experiments and satellite remote sensing analysis to provide a multiscale understanding of how these water-limited systems are influenced by ongoing changes in water availability.

So it's interesting to reflect on where I started weeding plots and now here I am running a lab thinking of ideas to guide research and try to advance the field. So that's it in a nutshell. I think that is remarkable.

And I think that's something that a lot of people may sort of take for granted, that your first job in research is probably not going to be the most exciting job you ever have. But if you stick with it, there are just these great opportunities and experiences that happen down the line there. Perhaps you could share with us, how did you decide that you wanted to start your lab at Montana State University?

I was obviously on the job market applying to jobs at these types of institutions, research intensive universities. And I applied to this job in 2019. And then, of course, the world changed shortly after. And I was like,

And I didn't hear anything back for two years. And then I get an email in January of 2022 saying, hey, you still interested? And I was like, yeah, let's talk because I obviously love this part of the country, the Intermountain West. But lo and behold, one of the largest intact grassland regions on Earth is just to the east of where we are, the Northern Great Plains. So it

Geographically, it made sense for my research program for a few different reasons. I was already working a lot in the Great Plains. That's where a lot of my research historically has been. But then also, there's this really underexplored region of the Earth that lends itself to advancing basic understanding of this part of the Great Plains, this cool semi-arid region of

of North America. And the position also allowed me to do some interesting things teaching-wise, teaching and developing a data science-focused course for majors that want to go into ecology, a skill that's increasingly essential if you want to do scientific research. You need to know how to work with data, and that typically involves using a programming language.

So I thought all those sorts of things were interesting and exciting. So sometimes the stars align. You can't predict when they will, obviously, but in this case, they appear to have more or less aligned. I think that's wonderful. It sounds like you were perhaps in the right place at the right time when a position opened up at exactly the right institution to be doing your research. But let's take a moment to talk a little bit more about the research that's going on there in the Felton Lab. So

Is there a particular project that you are working on right now or that you've worked on recently, Andrew, that you'd like to tell us more about?

What I'm working on right now that I'm excited about is this idea called the seasonal origin of water resources driving primary production or plant growth across the Great Plains. This interest started when I read a paper that was trying to understand what season trees in Swiss forests, the water that they're using ultimately to grow, where did that originate from? Was

Was it new water from rainfall that recently fell in the summer? Was it older water such as from snow melt? And what they found using water isotopes, which allow you to trace water molecules that had different weights essentially, what they discovered is that most of the water that plants are using and pumping out of their leaves is originated from its older precipitation from the winter.

that are not really using a lot of new precipitation to drive their growth. So it's not such the case that it just rains and then the plants grow. They're using water that originated in the system or is delivered in the system a long time ago. And so that got me thinking, can we apply that framework to the Great Plains? And can that explain any variation in how the

these systems respond to drought. So what we're doing is we're going all across the Great Plains and we're trying to understand via sampling plants and soils and then doing laboratory analysis of stable water isotopes, the water that's inside those plants, where did it actually originate from seasonally? Did it originate from snow melts?

or is it new precipitation that fell like a week or two ago? And we're doing that across all these different sites to see if there's a spatial signature. And then we're doing that through time to see if that seasonal origin of water for grasses and plant growth in the Great Plains, whether that also varies through time, such as during wet or dry years and things like that.

And I have a great student on that. And it's kind of allowed us to do some really fun fieldwork, too, and see parts of the country and really the world that maybe a lot of people will never see in the Great Plains. So that's what I'm really excited about. And that's supported by the USDA.

Oh, I think that's really cool. And I guess one question that comes immediately to mind is, are all of the plants within an ecosystem getting water from the same source? So I'm thinking maybe trees that have a deeper root system versus like a surface plant, a grass, something like that, that may have shallower roots.

Unlikely. In plant communities, there's questions of what allows coexistence to persist among all these different species, right? One potential explanation is there's niche partitioning or separation between

traits and interactions with the environment. And this sort of separation of niches can occur through time. So maybe certain plants are more active earlier in the growing season, like cool season grasses, and others are active later in the

such as warm season grasses. But maybe there's more spatial partitioning, such as they're just accessing water from different layers in the soil profile. And perhaps snowmelt versus rain enters the soil in a

goes into different locations within the soil. So it becomes really interesting to think about that degree of separation. So there's definitely a potential for us to shed more light on that. Some folks have asked similar questions like that, but there's always room to produce more knowledge there, I'd say.

Definitely. Well, this is a fascinating project and certainly complex as you started to highlight some of the different layers that can be pulled back on these questions. And I think in science, there are a lot of complexities, a lot of challenges, a lot of struggle and a lot of failure. And I think that's something that the public doesn't necessarily get to see every day because they see the shiny headlines that comes out at the end. So...

If you had to think about a time in your career where you really struggled with something or you had a major failure, Andrew, do you have an example that you could share with us today? Maybe talk us through how you got through it.

I wouldn't say this is a failure, but it was a definite challenge. And the end result is a success. During my second postdoc over at Chapman University, my advisor, Dr. Greg Goldsmith, had this longstanding interest in understanding and quantifying this idea of the transit time of water through vegetation or the travel time.

In simple terms, how long does it take water to flow through a plant? They absorb water through their roots and water eventually exits through their leaves, through their stomata and returns back to the atmosphere. So it's kind of this idea of the water cycle. It's a really important biogeochemical cycle on Earth. So we started this in 2021 and it just got published a few weeks ago.

That gives you a sense of how long these things take. So all along the way, we face challenges, right? So very simple challenges. Well, I have these complex data structures and I use R as a programming language. Well, back then, R wasn't good for working with those data structures. So then I had to learn Python, which helped me work with those structures, essentially. So a bit of a challenge, but at the end, results positive there.

And then we go all the way to submission. There were a lot of things that the peer review process asked for that initially presented challenges to us, but it pushed us to make the science better. So I'll give you two examples.

Initially, we had produced a global map using one year of data. So we used the year, I think, 2016, and we produced a map of these transit times across the world, essentially, for plants. So one reviewer was like, why are you doing one year? Why don't you do more? So we thought to ourselves, like, man, this is going to be tough because we have to essentially acquire all this new data and rerun the model we used.

So we figured out how to do that. And we pulled in a new collaborator who had the requisite skills to help us do that. But that took a long time. I mean, that took maybe six or so months to put all that in place. And then another reviewer was like, well, you're measuring like a really new and important quantity about the Earth. Do you have uncertainty estimates to bound them? So we're like, oh, man, how do we do that? What would that look like?

So again, a challenge, but also pushed us to make the science better. And so what we did is we were able to compare our estimates to some ground-based estimates and compare those to generate and propagate some uncertainty there around

the values we were producing. I learned better how to do an uncertainty estimate there. It was things like that. And this went through a few rounds of revision where each time it was like, well, how do we do that? Wow. But the end result was a much more robust, strong analysis. So whereas we started out with one year of data with no measures of uncertainty, now we're

The estimates are based off five years of data with associated uncertainty estimates. So over the last four years, we've been working on this project and it's finally been published. A broader point there is that it's not obviously 100% the case, but I do strongly believe in the peer review process to improve upon work, in vet work. That's one current thing that comes to mind. Here's a small thing though, for all you folks doing experiments. During my PhD...

I essentially tried to manipulate rainfall by excluding it. You build these rain out shelters with transparent polycarbonate roofs over experimental plots. And I essentially was married to my experiment when I did that because...

In Kansas, when the storms come, they come. And so I, after storms would come, drive up to my field site. And sometimes, once in a while, the roofs would be blown off my experimental plots. Oh, no. There you go. It's like, well, how am I going to react to this?

You just take note of that, factor it in and rebuild or put the bruise back on. It's never straightforward is what I found. And it can be a test of resolve and resilience, which is pretty important in research, I have found. Definitely. And I think doing anything in the field, you're sort of at the mercy of nature in a lot of cases. Has this shaped the kinds of experiments or maybe the way you design experiments now having had some of these challenging experiences, we'll say? Yeah.

There's a couple ways. I'm part of the International Drought Experiment, and it's actually quite hard when you think about it to impose an experimental drought in the context of estuaries

essentially nature because weather patterns are going to do what they do. One way to revise doing that sort of approach is to, as opposed to having like just one roof, you actually build like a curved, almost like a greenhouse type thing that's stronger and also prevents lateral blow in. So it's this more contained structure. And a lot of

Drought experiments use passive rainfall removal where they'll have slits in the roofs and remove a certain percentage of each rainfall event. So another approach is to exclude 100% of ambient rainfall and then add what you want. But do you think about what's a drought is just less rainfall? Well, when you dive into the details, experimentally imposing drought is actually quite complicated.

I think it's kind of an evolving thing and refining like how we go about doing that because it's really important, particularly out in the Western U.S. and other water limited systems that frequently are exposed to drought as well.

Definitely. Well, it sounds like there's perhaps some creative thinking and some trial and error that goes into these experiments to kind of understand what will work best. And I think this is part of solving the challenges in science, but we don't want to just dwell on the challenges. We'd love to talk about the successes. This first story you mentioned, of course, ended with a big success. Do you want to tell us more about this story or is there another success that you would like to highlight? Well, I can talk a little bit about the project itself and the results.

I am really excited by it. And it is a testament to being persistent and resilient and also why it's so important to have an interdisciplinary team. We spent four years working on this, going through revisions, and the end result, it's a paper published in Nature Water, is a really cool advance in our understanding of the water cycle. So...

We lack a large scale understanding of two things, really. How much fresh water is actually stored in plants globally? So essentially, what's the biomass water pool on Earth? So if you think of lakes, the atmosphere, rivers, glaciers, those are all pools of water. And we don't have a great estimate of how much water is actually stored in plants globally.

The paper, one, places some estimates on that and the amount of water stored in vegetation, which the majority of biomass on Earth is vegetation, is tiny compared to other pools. So we focused on above ground vegetation. It's like 484 cubic feet.

kilometers of water. But let's put that in the context of the atmosphere even. It's 3,000. Lakes, 175,000. Glaciers and snow, it's in the millions, I think. So putting a number on that is important. And then we were also able to estimate these travel times. How fast does water move through vegetation? And so while vegetation is a really small pool of freshwater, it's really dynamic and rapid and ephemeral.

So it's among the fastest components of the global water cycle. That should kind of open us up a little bit to how will vegetation feed back to climate change and the water cycle itself?

Because we know plants are constantly responding to their environment. And what we found is that the pace at which they essentially return water back to the atmosphere, recycle it back, is perhaps the fastest pool in the water cycle. It's the most ephemeral pool in the water cycle. So it's really dynamic.

And it's really exciting to finally see it in print. But there's a long journey to get there. So I don't want people to think it's ever easy. This journey starting in 2021, largely thanks to Dr. Greg Goldsmith over at Chapman University. Definitely. And you've been working on this project for years at this point. You mentioned the paper just came out a few weeks ago. How did you celebrate the end of this very long road? I wish I could say like I did something interesting.

but I have yet to fully do a concrete celebration of it. So part of talking with you and getting to talk with you on your platform is a form of celebration. I suspect when I see my co-authors, because they're all dispersed around the country at a conference, we'll make more of a point to celebrate. But

just being happy for the moment and enjoying that people are excited and finding it useful. That's been sufficient for me, but maybe I'll go out to dinner or something with my co-authors at the next conference. I can keep you updated on that. You should, you should. There needs to be a celebration after all that hard work. Yeah, no kidding.

Well, Andrew, thank you so much for sharing this success story and congratulations to you and your collaborators who worked on this really exciting project. And one of the things that you've hinted at throughout our conversation are some of the opportunities that you've had to travel, whether it's going to these different institutions for your training, working in the field, going to conferences. So when you think about all of your scientific travel, is there a particular place that you've been that was just your absolute favorite?

I do think I have been to some pretty interesting places. During my PhD, I had the opportunity to go to the Mongolian steppe in China to see those grasslands. I've had the opportunity to give research talks in Dublin and Leipzig, Germany. When I think about this, this past field campaign I was able to do to conduct this seasonal origin of water resources projects that I mentioned,

That allowed me to see parts of the country and the world that are super remote. But for a grassland ecologist by trade initial training, I got to see some of the most pristine intact grasslands on the country. So that's exciting to me.

seeing the Nebraska sandhills. That may not be exciting to everybody, but to me, that area is so fascinating. It's just these large sand dunes held intact by these grasses. There's yuccas. It's just really cool.

And then we were also able to go to Thunder Basin National Grassland over in Wyoming. And you just see these really intact systems that I don't often get to see. And I just was like, wow, it's a reminder kind of the being of being a scientist, actually the doing of the work and being in the system as opposed to the desk work.

I found that was really cool. But I want to say I probably feel that way because the context of it was this was a project that I conceived. I secured the funding for. I got the grad students, an excellent student and other technicians joined us. So to me, as

as an early career researcher, it meant a lot to me to be able to do that because I felt like I had really transitioned to this phase where I'm conducting work with these awesome early career people for a grant that I secured and conceived.

So I think I have warm, fuzzy feelings about that because of the broader context of being an early career PI, running a lab and having that really be one of my first experiences where it's like, wow, I'm really doing it. I came up with the idea. I got the grant. I have awesome people that I'm working with and like, whoa, look, it's this Nebraska Sandhills. Are you kidding me? So I think that's why I feel that way because of the bigger context.

I love that. One of those you made it moments is what I call them in my head. That's a good way to put it. Well, you've come a long way from your plot weeding days and I appreciate you sharing these successes and these experiences with us. And I think something that you've highlighted as well are some of the people that you've been able to work with, whether it's amazing mentors or students that have been doing amazing work in the field and in the lab.

I think the people in science are what make it so remarkable, but that's not often the reputation that we have, unfortunately, as scientists. When you look in the media, there's a certain way scientists tend to be portrayed, and it's just not true to life in so many cases. There are so many quirky, funny, amazing, creative scientists out there. So do you have an experience that you've shared with colleagues, whether it was a strange lab tradition or just a funny or fond memory that you can tell us about that maybe goes against the stereotypes that people may have?

I think on a human level, all the people I know are like pretty funny. I know some like quirky, serious scientists, but I feel like most of the scientists I know are actually quite funny on a personal level. And I think that's partly why some of them are so successful, because they have those other sets of skills. You leave a meeting with them and you feel good. That is an intangible skill that I feel like a lot of the mentors and colleagues I have have, and maybe it's underappreciated.

A couple of things that come to mind. One is this isn't really even humorous or anything, but it might be odd to the average person. I think it was like Labor Day weekend every year in my lab, in my PhD. The whole lab would essentially get in a van and drive from Colorado to Kansas. And we would spend the whole weekend, like two or three days,

clipping grass. And that's because we had to go over to eastern Kansas where there's all these projects and we're clipping grass to understand how all these different experiments influence primary productivity or the net biomass production over the year. I think that lends itself to a lot of camaraderie, perhaps

through shared misery. I don't know. But I liken it to like, I was in the cross country team in high school. And it's like some of my best memories were being with my friends just on the team. I don't think any of us really loved running. I kind of liken it to that. But it's kind of a strange concept to anybody else that you'd get in a van, drive to Kansas and spend the weekend clipping grass. So

Something that the PhD lab that I was in has done since I've left that's a little more fun is do a lot of escape rooms. I'm a little bitter because I've only been to one of them with them. So they decided to do more fun things, I think, when I left, maybe. I don't know. These Labor Day road trips sound great. They had their place. They were going to the Konza Prairie Biological Station.

Which I do think if you asked a lot of people like me in my field of study that question about like, what's the most amazing place you've been to? A lot of them would say the Konza Prairie. It's a really special area, part of the country, you know, the Flint Hills of Kansas. It's one of these last remnants of the tall grass prairie. The only reason it's there and preserved is because it was too rocky and hilly to plow.

So you have this pristine, more or less remnant of the past that's super beautiful and cuts against a lot of people's perceptions of Kansas, I'll say, too. So it wasn't all bad. You get to clip grass in a beautiful place. It's not too bad. Well, it sounds like at least a very good bonding experience for everybody involved. And I think this camaraderie, this teamwork is critical in science because you are tackling some difficult problems and answering some really phenomenal questions. But it

But if we took away the things that typically hold you back, Andrew, whether it's funding, feasibility, time, staff, etc., is there one question that you would most want to answer?

In the early 2010s, I forget which year, there were a couple studies published that changed the context in which people like me do their research. And specifically, what emerged was this understanding that dry lands, so water-limited systems, which, by the way, comprise roughly 40% of the land population,

So savannas, deserts, grasslands, shrublands, types of systems. There was research that came out that kind of illuminated the fact that these dryland systems are really important for driving interannual variability in the carbon cycle.

And it's this idea of the land carbon sink. So how much carbon went into and was stored into the land over a year. It's really important for understanding the future pace of things like climate change. But what was demonstrated is that these dry land systems are really important.

for driving the year-to-year variability in the global carbon cycle by virtue of how they influence the ability of the land to absorb and store carbon. And that variability is largely driven by how these water-limited areas respond to weather. You can imagine that if it's a wet year, you might get a flush of vegetation growth. If you propagate that across space, there are really large-scale impacts, such as to atmospheric CO2 composition.

That changed a bit the context and urgency of the work for a lot of dry land focused researchers like me because it laid this foundational understanding that there's global scale implications to understanding these systems, which are kind of viewed as marginal and not very productive, but they're very dynamic.

If I had trillions of dollars and unlimited resources, I would really scale up and integrate things that are already going on. And what I would try to understand is what is the current and future role of dry lands in the global carbon cycle? And what does that mean for the future pace of climate change? So trying to understand the ability of dry lands to absorb carbon in the future and how that may in turn feed back to climate change.

So what I would do is a ton of field experiments, just manipulating different global change drivers, these factorial experiments with drought, enhanced CO2 temperature. I would do all these experiments across all these different dry lands from the Western U.S., Australia, South Africa, everywhere that is essentially limited by water.

And then I would have all that information be integrated and parameterized with the best models on Earth, such as Oak Ridge National Lab, where I did a fellowship, is at the cutting edge of modeling the Earth system. And then assimilating other data, too, such as from satellites. So it'd be essentially turning into a broad, big network of experiments, models, and satellite data sets to transform

try to better understand the current role and future role of dry lands in the global carbon cycle, the land carbon sink, and their role in influencing future rates of climate change, if you will. So people are doing this with the resources we have, but if you take off the limits, I would scale it up and integrate it. And hopefully that would move us forward a bit. But

I'm sure there would be humongous logistical challenges. Sure. We'll take care of those two today. Well, I love this project idea of really kind of going in depth and getting a true understanding of this. It sounds like historically relatively underappreciated dry land systems. So we appreciate you giving us something to ponder today. And Andrew, you've shared quite a bit of your own story.

We always love to end by talking about advice. So if our listeners out there are struggling with something in their own lives or science, do you have a piece of advice that really helped you along the way that you can share with them today?

I'll say a couple of things. I understand it's not this simple, but I think not in so many words or necessarily like sat me down and said this, but I do think growing up there was a consistent message from my parents that if I want to make it super simple, it's like attitude is everything. It's very important. So try to see the potential good in situations in the world.

So I'm not saying necessarily to suspend reality or anything, but try to see the potential positivity

in challenges that come up. That was a consistent theme growing up that I try to keep in mind and it plays back into this idea of focusing on what you can control and try to make a positive step forward. This idea of it perhaps isn't completely what happens to you but how you respond to things feeding into that sort of theme and also it certainly is much easier I think to be pessimistic but

I have the, I don't want to say luxury, but I have the opportunity in my job to both work with folks who are in the capacity of mentors for me and to serve as mentors for others. In both cases, those who have mentored me and those who I get to teach and mentor, the future, if you will, those are like extreme sources of positivity and reason to be optimistic about the world. The

The people in my lab, the early career researchers, they're super curious, they're super motivated, and that gives me a lot of optimism for the future. And the students, similarly in my classes, are super engaged, curious. I think they want to have a positive impact in the world with their environmental science degrees.

And similarly with those who have mentored me along the way, I wouldn't really have been here without them. And so I continue to draw inspiration from those who are supporting me with their mentorship and those I get to pay it forward with in terms of being a mentor and teacher. So there are things to draw optimism from, and I certainly draw optimism from that in my work and through the future of science as well.

Definitely. I think it's super helpful to really think about and focus on those positive impacts that you can have. So I really appreciate you sharing that message with us. Andrew, is there any other last note of inspiration that you would like to share with listeners at the end of our conversation today?

It's incredible the amount of things in research that are being discovered every day. If you just look on Google Scholar, go into journals such as Nature or Science, it's just amazing the things that are being revealed about the natural world. And the pace of those discoveries seems to only be increasing.

Every time has their challenges, but we also live in a really exciting time, particularly to do science. So just a reminder about that. There's so many people doing so many cool things. As you know, that's your job. You get to talk to these people. So maybe I'm preaching to the choir. Oh, I'm sold. Yeah, it is an exciting time to be a part of the scientific enterprise. And by virtue of those who I get to work with, I draw a lot of optimism.

Well, what a wonderful note to end on, Andrew. Thank you so much. If our listeners want to learn more about you and the work that you're doing, how can they get in touch or where should they go? Well, I have an email. I'm kind of in the woods on social media right now. But I think that the lowest barrier would be to look me up on my faculty page. So it's Montana State University Land Resources and Environmental Sciences.

And then it has my faculty profile. It has my email and it has a link to my website as well, which is through Weebly. So that'd probably be the lowest barrier to entry. Well, that's perfect. Listeners, definitely take some time to learn more about Andrew and his research. Check out his website. And Andrew, thank you so much for joining us and sharing a piece of your story today.

Thanks so much for having me. It's fun to talk about these things and reflect. And this was a lot of fun. So thanks. Well, it was a pleasure to have you here. Listeners, wonderful to have you here with us as well. We hope you join us again next time for another episode of People Behind the Science.