"Over the past couple years, my students and I have been working across timescales trying to improve our understanding of how carbon is transformed, stored within, and lost from terrestrial environments. This work has kept us busy both in the lab on campus and sent us as far away as the Southern Hemisphere.
Kyle Smart and Suravi Paul have both been conducting laboratory experiments in an effort to understand how we can use soil gas signals to understand critical belowground processes. For Kyle, this has meant feeding soil microbes different types of food ranging from simple sugars to fatty acids and measuring how that affects microbial growth and respiration. He recently published the first chapter of his dissertation in the journal Biogeosciences! Suravi has been focused on the role of roots in soils, which has led her to growing tubs full of grass in the lab and simulating different rainfall patterns.
I have led two trips to South Africa as part of a joint US鈥揝outh African project that is assessing how human land-use change can affect natural soil carbon stabilization pathways. As part of this work, we built a long-term soil monitoring station in the Western Cape region that is the center of Alyssa Reinhardt鈥檚 dissertation research. This interdisciplinary project has definitely pushed us outside of our comfort zones, as Alyssa can attest to having spent a few hours stealing pieces of plant debris out of the jaws of termites in the name of science.
We are also using the terrestrial sedimentary record to explore how sea level affects carbon dynamics and nutrient cycling on longer timescales. This
work has centered involved using Cretaceous rocks from southern Utah. Leah Stanevich recently defended her MS thesis on these deposits and Abby
Latea is a new MS student taking the project in a new exciting direction."