Kiona Ogle (PI) and Co-PI’s Jarrett Barber, Kimberly Samuels-Crow, Drew Peltier, and Debbie Huntzinger (all affiliated with SICCS) were awarded an NSF Macrosystem Biology grant ($3.6M, 5-years) to study “Climate legacies and timescales of influence on carbon cycle processes in drylands,” with a focus on synthesizing data related to tree growth, ecosystem productivity and carbon exchange, and vegetation productivity and biomass across the western US, to understand how climate extremes (e.g., drought) impact carbon fluxes and pools at different spatial and temporal scales, and to evaluate if process-based biosphere models are capable of capturing responses inferred from empirical datasets. The group will collaborate with colleagues at UCLA with expertise in remote sensing data products and data-model assimilation; the team will begin hiring project personnel in Spring 2023.