Interviewed by STICH Scholar and Ecoss social media specialist Kayla Blair. Meet Jasmine Anenberg, a PhD student in the Bowker lab! This lab’s main job is to learn about and restore soil function to areas that have been degraded, by preventing erosion, stimulating nutrient cycling and productivity, or manipulating water […]
Moss-associated N2 fixation provides a substantial but heterogeneous input of new N to nutrient-limited ecosystems at high latitudes. In spite of the broad diversity of mosses found in boreal and Arctic ecosystems, the extent to which host moss identity drives variation in N2 fixation rates remains largely undetermined. We used […]
Globally, soils store two to three times as much carbon as currently resides in the atmosphere, and it is critical to understand how soil greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions and uptake will respond to ongoing climate change. In particular, the soil-to-atmosphere CO2 flux, commonly though imprecisely termed soil respiration (RS), is […]
Plant functional traits can be used to predict ecosystem responses to climate gradients, yet precipitation explains very little variation for most traits. Soil water availability directly influences plant water uptake and thus may assist with the improvement of plant trait–water relationships. However, this promise remains poorly realized due to rare […]
Quantitative stable isotope probing (qSIP) estimates the degree of incorporation of an isotope tracer into nucleic acids of metabolically active organisms and can be applied to microorganisms growing in complex communities, such as the microbiomes of soil or water. As such, qSIP has the potential to link microbial biodiversity and […]
Plant functional traits can be used to predict ecosystem responses to climate gradients, yet precipitation explains very little variation for most traits. Soil water availability directly influences plant water uptake and thus may assist with the improvement of plant trait–water relationships. However, this promise remains poorly realized due to rare […]
NAU joins with ASU, UA and Arizona communities to confront climate crisis As Arizona confronts the impacts of a hotter world, Northern Arizona University is joining partners from Arizona State University, the University of Arizona and communities from throughout the state to convene the first statewide, solutions-focused climate summit. Climate […]
Piling and burning is widely used to dispose of unmerchantable debris resulting from thinning in forests throughout the western United States. Quite often more piles are created than are burned in a given year, however, causing piles to persist, accumulate, and age on the landscape. The effects of burning piles […]
The continuously increasing concentration of atmospheric CO2 has considerably altered ecosystem functioning. However, few studies have examined the long-term (i.e. over a decade) effect of elevated CO2 on soil microbial communities. Using 16S rRNA gene amplicons and a GeoChip microarray, we investigated soil microbial communities from a Californian annual grassland […]
Soil microbial communities of the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica (MDV) contain representatives from at least fourteen bacterial phyla. However, given low rates of microbial activity, it is unclear whether this richness represents functioning rather than dormant members of the community. We used stable isotope probing (SIP) with 18O-water to determine if […]