A Montana State University professor’s research on plant chemistry in the Northern Great Plains and Northern Rockies has been published in Global Change Biology, a prominent journal that promotes exploration of the connections between biological processes and environmental change.
A Montana State University professor’s research on plant chemistry in the Northern Great Plains and Northern Rockies has been published in Global Change Biology, a prominent journal that promotes exploration of the connections between biological processes and environmental change.
Jack Brookshire, associate professor in the Department of Land Resources and Environmental Sciences in the MSU College of Agriculture, combined satellite data and plant samples from more than 300 locations around the Northern Great Plains and Northern Rockies to examine trends in greening, a metric which represents plant productivity through photosynthesis. The project began in 2016 and was supported by National Science Foundation EPSCoR funding and a research grant through the Montana Agriculture Experiment Station.
“Studies using remote sensing were showing that much of Earth’s land surface has been getting greener over the last several decades mostly due to increased carbon dioxide in the atmosphere,” said Brookshire. “However, there was also evidence that plant nitrogen content was declining. No one had yet combined analyses of vegetation greening trends with those changes in plant chemistry.”
Read more at: Montana State University
