Grant Falvo is a PhD student in the Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences Department at Michigan State University. He works in the Robertson lab within the disciplines of soil microbial ecology and biogeochemistry and is interested in global change phenomena broadly. There are more microorganisms in a typical handful of soil than there are people on this planet. Every year these microbes emit >5 times as much CO2 as all the fossil fuel emissions emitted by humans. Yet recent research is beginning to uncover the dominant role these microbes play in stabilizing a similarly large
Archives for August 2020
Supporting Michigan farmers using soil health assessment tools: Reflections from an LTER fellow
Graduate researcher, Xinyi Tu, is a graduate student advised by Dr. Sieglinde Snapp in the Department of Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences Department at Michigan State University (MSU). The term “soil health” is similar to that of the health of an organism – it originates from the underlying connection of soil to animal and human health, and to the connection between soil and its living biota. However, there is no concensus amongst scholars as to what soil health means, and various definitions can be found in the literature. This confusion translates to farmers through the creation
Welcoming our new Science Coordinator, Nameer Baker
We are excited to welcome Nameer Baker to the KBS LTER community. He joins us as the new Science Coordinator, and to get to know him better we sat him down (virtually) to answer a few questions! What’s your research background and interests? My background is in microbial ecology. My postdoc focused on microbes in the rhizosphere of switchgrass growing in marginal soil, and my PhD focused on litter decomposer communities in Mediterranean ecosystems. I was originally drawn to microbes because of their ubiquity - I wanted to study problems that were facing human society, and so many