This is the WFHB Local News for Monday, January 3rd, 2021.

This week, we will take a look back at the stories we covered in the year 2021. In today’s episode, we will review the second part of environmental stories from this past year.

You will hear Nathaniel Weinzapfel speak with an IU researcher on drylands, Kade Young covers lead contaminated ash and debris after a prescribed burning. You will also hear from the environmental group, Sunrise Bloomington.

All that and more in Local Environmental Stories: 2021 In Review Part Two.

Indiana University Professor Awarded NASA Grant to Study Drylands

When you think of drylands, what first comes to mind? A field of zebras galloping across the savannas of Africa. Or, perhaps, a rattlesnake slithering past cacti in the deserts of Arizona. Maybe you think of a herd of cattle, munching their way through the Great Plains of the United States.

Dryland ecosystems make up around 40% of the land in the United States, including the vast desert of the Southwest and the Great Plains. Similarly, drylands comprise 40% of the entire Earth’s land surface. With this in mind, a better understanding of such a vast area of the globe proves necessary.

The world’s drylands and subtypes. Prepared using spatial data. (Courtesy of the Food and Agriculture Organization of the United Nations)

Indiana University professor Natasha MacBean shares a similar sentiment. She was recently awarded a grant from the NASA Research Opportunities in Space and Earth Sciences Carbon Cycle Science program to do just that, to understand more about drylands and specifically their role in the carbon cycle and how climate change could affect the ecosystem. Last week, Professor MacBean spoke with WFHB news about her work.

“My research into dry lands is primarily to understand the kind of ecosystem scale processes, that is the interaction between vegetation and water and carbon cycling and how that is responding to climate change and to land management change as well. Mostly that’s driven or motivated by a wider research theme of mine which is to understand global carbon cycling. We are obviously emitting carbon dioxide into the atmosphere and the land and the ocean are taking up, their absorbing about 50 percent of those emissions so we know that kind of global scale number but what we don’t know is really which ecosystems, which regions, and which processes are driving that, sort of what we call a sink of carbon. We also don’t know if we’re going to sort of maintain that 50 percent reduction on our emissions into the future or not. So we need to understand that better and it has been highlighted in the past decade or so that semi-arid ecosystems, even in dryland ecosystems more broadly, are playing a big role in that sort of year to year variability in global carbon cycling and so we want to understand that a bit better. There are lots of people working in the field in dryland ecosystems and understanding processes and that work has been going on for a while but where my research comes in is really scaling that up to broader scales, sort of regional to continental scales and then up to the globe as well and then for the second component of that is making sure that our process of understanding of the carbon, water, and vegetation dynamics is implemented into the kinds of global Earth system models that we are using for climate change projections for the I. P. C. C. for example.”

With this broad overview of Professor MacBean’s work in mind, the expert shared more about drylands themselves and some of their characteristics.

“Dry lands are inherently water limited. Most of the ecosystem processes are driven by moisture availability. So that means that there’s less rainfall on average and there is a potential for evaporation and evapotranspiration. There are lots of different strategies in these ecosys...