Warming global temperatures are changing life on every continent on Earth, including Antarctica, where more microbes are moving in to territory previously covered by ice. How these microbes respond to warming offers us clues about what future Antarctica will look like and who will thrive there. Microbial ecologist and PhD Read more…
If the fate of carbon is a test that planet Earth is taking right now, one of the answer keys is likely to be found in soil, where microorganisms—which account for nearly 15 percent of global biomass, by some estimates—eat, store and respire carbon and other nutrients. As Earth warms, Read more…
Former Ecoss Postdoctoral researcher Natasja van Gestel, now at Texas Tech University, and Bruce Hungate and Paul Dijkstra from ECOSS are using deglaciated area in Antarctica to investigate plants and microbial responses to warming. Two graduate students will be integral to the success of the study: Kelly McMillen (Texas Tech Read more…
A team of scientists from Northern Arizona University’s Center for Ecosystem Science and Society (Ecoss) and Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory (LLNL) recently announced a major achievement in ecosystem science. Their research, published as “Estimating taxon-specific population dynamics in diverse microbial communities” in the journal Ecosphere, illustrates a powerful new technique Read more…
“NAU Regents’ Professor Bruce Hungate, director of the Center for Ecosystem Science and Society (Ecoss), recently joined a new initiative lead by LLNL to study how the soil microbiome controls the mechanisms that regulate the stabilization of the organic matter in soil. “How do different kinds of microorganisms in the soil grow? How Read more…
Measuring the growth rates of individual bacteria taxa within a mixed sample gives a powerful view of the moving parts of a living ecosystem, especially when that sample is soil, where so many ecological processes occur. Ecoss research pioneered “qSIP” — a new method for gathering many simultaneous bacterial growth Read more…
Native soil carbon (C) can be lost in response to fresh C inputs, via the “priming effect,” a phenomenon observed for decades yet still not understood. Using dual-stable isotope probing, Ecoss research showed that priming involves changes in the diversity and composition of two functional bacterial groups: a single-substrate pulse Read more…