Matthew BowkerAssociate Director, Associate Professor

Published by Stephanie Mayer on

Biocrusts, Community ecology, Restoration ecology matthew.bowker@nau.edu
  • Google Scholar Logo
  • Research Gate Logo

Bowker has broad interests within ecosystem science. He is both a plant and soil ecologist, and works in applied and fundamental science settings, in many ecosystem and community types including forests, rangelands and deserts. His research has spanned multiple levels of organization – organisms, populations, communities, ecosystems, landscapes – and has ranged in scale from microcosm to global.

The unifying thread in the majority of his research to date has been his long-term fascination with the dryland ecosystems of the world and their sustainable use. He has conducted research in most western US states, most of the major North American deserts and semi-arid ecoregions, in addition to drylands of Spain, Australia and Mexico and desert-like degraded regions of Iceland.

By addressing fundamental questions about dryland ecosystem function, and employing a from-the-ground-up soil-focused approach to dryland restoration, Bowker hopes to enable better understanding and wiser use of rapidly changing dryland biomes.

Full Curriculum Vitae 
Lab Website
Selected Publications
  1. Bowker MA, Doherty K., Antoninka AJ, Ramsey PW, DuPre ME, Durham RA (2022) Biocrusts influence community plant development, promoting native plant dominance. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution 10:840324.
  2. Eldridge DJ, Reed SC, Travers S, Bowker MA, Maestre F, Ding J, Havrilla C, Rodriguez-Caballero E, Barger N, Weber B, Antoninka A, Belnap J, Chaudhary VB, Faist A, Ferrenberg S, Huber-Sannwald E, Malam Issa O, Zhou Y (2020) The pervasive and multifaceted influence of biocrusts on water in the world’s drylands. Global Change Biology 26: 6003-6014.
  3. Remke M, Johnson N, Williamson M, Bowker MA. 2020. Sympatric pairings of dryland grass population, mycorrhizal fungi, and associated soil biota enhance mutualism and ameliorate drought stress. Journal of Ecology 109:1210-1223.
  4. Maestre FT, Quero JL, Gotelli NJ, Ochoa V, Delgado-Baquerizo M, García-Gómez M, Bowker MA et al. (over 50 authors) (2012) Biodiversity enhances ecosystem multifunctionality in the world’s drylands. Science 335: 214-217
  5. Bowker MA (2007) Biological soil crust rehabilitation in theory and practice: an underexploited opportunity. Restoration Ecology 15: 13-23

 

Categories:

Related Posts

A CIRCUIT SHOWS HOW CLIMATE WARMING MAY ALTER DIFFERENT ECOLOGICAL LEGACIES IN THE ARCTIC BOREAL FOREST, WHICH THEN FEEDBACK INTO CLIMATE WARMING AND CHANGES TO LANDSCAPE PROCESSES.

NAU-led research team receives $9.6M to study how Alaska’s forests change, adapt to warmer future

Ecological memory stored in a landscape can help an ecosystem recover from disturbances like fire and outbreaks of disease. But what happens when climate warming disrupts that process? How long before ecological memories stored in Read more…

A SCATTERPLOT DEPICTS HOW MUCH CARBON OR OXYGEN ISOTOPE DIFFERENT SOIL BACTERIA TOOK INTO THEIR DNA (A PROXY FOR GROWTH) DURING A 7-DAY EXPERIMENT. SMALL POINTS REPRESENT THE GROWTH OF INDIVIDUAL BACTERIAL STRAINS LINKED BY LINES TO THE AVERAGE GROWTH OF THEIR CLOSEST IDENTIFIED GENUS. COLORS WERE ASSIGNED BY A CLUSTERING ALGORITHM TO GROUP GENERA INTO FAST-GROWING OR SLOW-GROWING LIFESTYLES.

Lifestyles of the fast and slow (bacteria): In the wild, most live in the slow lane

A study led by Northern Arizona University offers new evidence that a common framework to sort bacteria into two lifestyles doesn’t easily apply to bacteria living in wild soil. The findings, published in The ISME Journal, show Read more…

A trio of illustrated panels depicts the soil microbial communities in three treatments of a long-term warming experiment north of Flagstaff, Arizona. The panels are labeled in gray text, left to right: control, short-term warming, long-term warming. The control treatment, far left, depicts bacteria, protists, and other microorganisms identified by sequencing the soil’s metagenome in yellow, orange, green, and blue, along with chains of available nutrients. Soil depicted in the center panel, which has undergone short-term warming, shows an increased abundance and diversity of microbes, some of which are growing, incorporating nutrients, and respiring carbon dioxide. The soil that has undergone long-term warming, imagined in the panel on the right, shows fewer microbial species and competitive relationships that are developing for control of the scarcer nutrients.

Does a warmer future favor microbial friend or foe? Ecoss researchers win $3.4M to study interactions in changing soil

In 2002, the Odyssey probe discovered evidence of past ice on Mars. The U.S. Congress authorized the Iraq War resolution. The Anaheim Angels won the World Series. And in a meadow 15 miles north of Read more…