Research

Whittell is a living laboratory that provides a rare opportunity for exploration and scientific discovery in the Sierra Nevada Front of Nevada.

Sarah Bisbing measuring the diameter of a tree trunk in a forest

Opportunity: Whittell Forest Graduate Research Grants

Now accepting applications through May 30, 2025!

Graduate students of all disciplines are encouraged to apply for this unique opportunity to work on research projects in the Whittell Forest & Wildlife Area. Two awards of $5,000 are available to graduate students enrolled in any academic program at the University of Nevada, Reno or the University of Nevada, Las Vegas.

Grant details

Publications from research at Whittell

Projects based on research and creative activities at Whittell

Featured research projects

Retention of water in wildfire burned areas

Ongoing research at the Whittell Forest by the Ecohydrology and Ecosystem Processes Group focuses on the interplay of ecosystem productivity, wildfire disturbances and water cycling.

Sandquist and Corcoran install a Bowen-Ratio energy-balance station in the meadow at Whittell, to measure heat and water fluxes from the surface.In the summer of 2023, doctoral student Abbie Sandquist, master’s student Sydney Corcoran and Scott Allen, assistant professor of ecohydrology and physiological ecology, established stations to measure the flux of water and heat to the atmosphere in ecosystems affected and unaffected by the 2016 Little Valley fire.

The post-fire sagebrush shrubland used approximately 33% less water and maintained higher soil moisture throughout the summer than did a paired shrubland site that did not burn in 2016. Funded by NASA and the ECOSTRESS mission, this is one of the eight paired post-fire and control plots in Great-Basin shrubland ecosystems that have been established by the research group.

Preliminary findings have been presented at the American Geophysical Union Fall Meeting (2023) by Abbie Sandquist, and at the Society of Rangeland Management Annual Meeting (2024) by Sydney Corcoran. In the summer of 2024, doctoral student Johanne Albrigtsen will build on this work by installing a more permanent system to measure evaporation from forest floors in differently treated forest ecosystems.

Designing models to show how soil heating affects microbial processes

The Fire and Dryland Ecosystem Lab, led by Erin Hanan, associate professor of fire and ecosystem ecology, is investigating how soil heating influences soil microbial processes.

Erin Hanan, Ph.D., working prepping an experiment in the field with her research team.The research is funded through a USDA NIFA grant and is being conducted in collaboration with Jessica Miesel (University of Idaho), Matt Dickinson (US Forest Service) and Indrek Whickham (Michigan State University). The team designed a novel burn table experiment to measure soil heating across a range of depths, fuel loading, parent material and soil moisture in a factorial design. This experiment was led by doctoral student Elena Cox at the University of Nevada, Reno.

Elena collected soils derived from two distinct parent materials in the Sierra Nevada:

  1. Decomposed granite soils were collected from Whittell Forest
  2. Andesite soils were collected from the Sagehen Experiment Forest

They filled calorimeters with soils collected from the two sites and layered duff and litter (also collected from Whittell) on the table above the calorimeters to represent moderate and high surface fuel loading. In each calorimeter, they installed temperature sensors at multiple depths. They estimated flame temperatures using temperature-sensitive paints, thermal imaging at the location of each calorimeter using an FLIR camera, and radiant energy from the surface using a radiometer. Following the burn, they estimated soil microbial biomass, respiration and extracellular enzyme activity at multiple depths in each soil profile. They are also quantifying total and exchangeable organic carbon and nitrogen, and fungal to bacterial ratios.

This research is expected to yield several publications and will contribute to advancing the Soil Heating In Fire Model (SheFire) developed in the Hanan lab in a prior project led by master’s student Mary Brady.

How forest floor plant litter alters evaporation and snowmelt rates

Johanne Albrigtsen is a doctoral student in the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program of Hydrologic Sciences. She has been a Whittell Graduate Student Fellow for two years conducting research that investigates the role of plant litter in soil moisture dynamics.

Johanne Albrigtsen portrait in an oudoor location with a river and snow covered mountains in the background.A key unknown is how the variable presence of litter alters evaporation and snowmelt rates on the forest floor. Litter can be lost due to disturbances such as fires or increased due to fuels treatments. Masticated or chipped wood is used in restoration and to dispose of residue from forestry activities, but the effects of these practices on soil-water content and forest growing conditions are understudied. In seasonally snow-covered landscapes, such as the Whittell Forest, this relationship has the potential to impact snowmelt timing and the duration of plant-available soil water.

To quantify the distinct consequences of litter depth on mulching effects, Johanne installed instrumentation at Whittell Forest to measure water and energy balances across different litter treatments. Her project will be ongoing through 2025.

Investigating aquatic ecosystems in mountain catchments

Kelly Loria is a doctoral student in the Interdisciplinary Graduate Program of Ecology, Evolution and Conservation Biology. Her work focuses on aquatic ecosystem function in mountain catchments. Kelly is especially interested in how climate change may cause phenological mismatches between physical signals and biogeochemical responses in aquatic ecosystems.

Kelly Loria collecting samples from a stream at the Whittell Forest & Wildlife Area.Climate warming trends and the expected variability in the timing and intensity of precipitation in mountain regions could alter the availability of key resources like nitrogen during the winter months, with unknown effects on ecosystem energy fluxes (i.e., primary productivity [GPP] and ecosystem respiration [ER]).

Kelly is currently exploring the watershed level pressure that streams can exert on near-shore metabolism using three years’ worth of high-resolution dissolved oxygen and water quality monitoring data as well as seasonal biogeochemical data on potential rates of nitrogen cycling in Tahoe Basin watersheds in California and Nevada.

Kelly and team explored temporal trends in stream ecosystem function at Franktown Creek in 2020, as one site in a larger spatial analysis of mountain stream energetics for the greater Tahoe Basin. They found that the warmest daily water temperatures (18°C) and the maximum modeled GPP (5.326 g O2 m-2 d) and ER (-15.931 g O2 m-2 d-1) occurred in late July. In contrast, water temperatures, GPP, and ER all declined in August. This decline coincided with highly variable daily specific conductance, likely representing increased flume water releases from Hobart Reservoir.

Check out Kelly Loria’s time series visualizations.