Semester Fellowships
2024-2025
- DeShae Dillard (Entomology) – Establishing pest and beneficial arthropod monitoring in the LTAR Aspirational Cropping System Experiment
- Rachel Drobnak (Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences) – Exploring shifts in soil food webs and nitrogen cycling in response to prairie strip management
- Zohre Eshghdoostkhatami (Civil and Environmental Engineering) – Identification of methanotrophs in agricultural soils capable of carbon uptake from trichloroethene
- Cynthia Fiser (Entomology) – Understanding the barriers to adoption of prairie strips on rural Michigan farms
- Xin Lan (Geography, Environment, and Spatial Sciences) – Optimizing agricultural economic outputs through strategic reservoir water storage and trading among states in the U.S.A.
- Annabelle McCarthy (Integrative Biology) – Investigating potential ecological traps: small prairie patches in cropland
- Daniel Mok (Plant Biology) – Investigation of phylloplane pH regulation structures in six Gossypium species
- Paul Ojo (Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences) – Assessing and modeling the spatio-temporal variability of crop residue cover and soil health metrics in a corn-soybean-wheat rotation
- Goutham Thotakuri (Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences) – Effect of water stress on soil pore structure in plant systems of contrasting biological diversity
- Moriah Young (Integrative Biology) – Uncovering the short- and long-term temporal changes of an early-successional field’s soil microbial community under climate warming and drought
2023-2024
- DeShae Dillard (Entomology) – Functional diversity and community composition of Diptera in agroecosystems
- Juliana Hanle (Earth and Environmental Sciences) – Can synthetic aperture radar remotely identify climate-smart management and crop yield?
- Jincheng Huang (Fisheries and Wildlife, Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability) – The impacts of COVID-19 on global agricultural landscapes and biodiversity
- Nan Jia (Fisheries and Wildlife, Center for Systems Integration and Sustainability) – Climate change drives crop-weed competition shifts and threatens future food security
- Tvisha Martin (Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences) – Can soil food webs recover from drought? Assessing nematode communities within rain exclusion shelters that vary in drought intensity
- Prateek Sharma (Earth and Environmental Sciences) – Understanding the major drivers for N2O dynamics under different management systems
- Goutham Thotakuri (Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences) – Effects of water stress on soil pore structure in plant systems of contrasting biological diversity
- Ethan Weinrich (Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences) – Bioassay for detecting the coupled effects of cover crop species and AMF on soil phosphorus acquisition from disparate soils
- Moriah Young (Integrative Biology) – Uncovering short- and long-term temporal changes of an early successional field’s soil microbial community affected by climate warming and drought
- Zheng Li (Civil and Environmental Engineering) – Examining the microorganisms assimilating carbon from 1,4-dioxane in contaminated and uncontaminated soil sediments
2022-2023
- Stephanie Clark (Integrative Biology) – Farmscapes to Forests: Re-establishing the KBS-LTER Artist-in-Residency
- Kara Dobson (Integrative Biology) – The effects of warming and drought on volatile emissions from Solidago canadensis
- Cynthia Fiser (Entomology) – Weed seed and insect predation by ground beetles within prairie strips and surrounding row crops
- Brandon Latorre (Plant Biology) – Phenological responses in experimentally-restored prairies
- Natalie Loduca (Agricultural, Food, and Resource Economics) – Elicitation and estimation of risk preference and subjective probabilities to understand farmer decisions on climate change adaptation
- Tvisha Martin (Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences) – Does plant community composition affect soil food web functioning across varying aggregate sizes?
- KC Rabin (Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences) – When does cover crop residue release nitrogen during the cash crop season?
- Corinn Rutkoski (Integrative Biology) – Farmscapes to Forests: Re-establishing the KBS-LTER Artist-in-Residency
- Tayler Ulbrich (Integrative Biology) – Exploring how farmers’ perceptions of soil health affect their management decisions
- Moriah Young (Integrative Biology) – Does the soil microbial community explain plant responses to warming and drought in the field?
2021-2022
- Isabela Lima Borges (Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences) – The effects of plant inbreeding on the legume-rhizobia mutualism (lightning talk)
- Andrew Curtright (Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences) – Picky eaters: how C preference influences microbial community function (lightning talk)
- Kara Dobson (Integrative Biology) – The effects of drought and warming on the emission of volatile organic compounds from plants (lightning talk)
- Alice Puchalsky (Integrative Biology) – Prairie strips and caterpillar-parasitoid networks (lightning talk)
- Corinn Rutkoski (Integrative Biology) – Soil microbial community responses
to prairie strip establishment (lightning talk) - Pietro Sciusco (Geography, Environment and Spatial Sciences) – Global warming impacts of a managed landscape in southwestern Michigan: biogeophysical and biogeochemical climate regulations (lightning talk)
- Abrianna Soule (Plant Biology) – Combined effects of soil deposition and below-ground mutualism on plant defensive chemistry (lightning talk)
- Luwen Wan (Earth and Environmental Sciences) – Mapping tile drainage using satellite imagery and random forest machine-learning (lightning talk)
- Moriah Young (Integrative Biology) – The interactive effects of climate change and soil microbiomes on below- and aboveground trophic interactions in an early successional plant community (lightning talk)
- Jennifer Zavalnitskaya (Entomology) – Evaluating herbivore community composition across agricultural landscapes (lightning talk)
- Yuqian Zhang (Fisheries and Wildlife) – Biofuel impact on life on land: Sustainable Development Goal 15 (lightning talk)
2020-2021
- Oishi Bagchi (Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences) – Microbial dormancy and resuscitation in response to stress- associated phytohormones (lightning talk)
- Isabela Lima Borges (Kellogg Biological Station, Integrative Biology) – Testing the effects of inbreeding and soil legacy on legume-rhizobia mutualisms (lightning talk)
- Grant Falvo (Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences) – Resilience of microbial communities and soil organic matter formation to more extreme precipitation regimes across agricultural landscapes (lightning talk)
- Veronica Frans (Fisheries and Wildlife, Environmental Science and Policy Program): New era, new niche, new theory: revising ecological niche theory to account for human influence in the Anthropocene (lightning talk)
- Jinho Lee (Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences) – Long-term effect of plant diversity on soil C dynamics and C-based interactions between plant diversity, physical micro-environment, and microorganisms (lightning talk)
- Daniel Hoffman (Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences) – Plant diversity Ecosystem Services and Resiliency (lightning talk)
- Vidhya Ramalingam (Environmental Engineering Department) – Evaluation of 1,4-Dioxane Biodegradation Using Various Soil Inocula and Biomolecular Tools (lightning talk)
- Doug Slater (Department of Community Sustainability) – Farmer Mental Models of Nutrient Management Decisions (lightning talk)
- Allison Zahorec (Entomology) – Does prairie strip establishment alter the vertical stratification of microarthopod communities? (lightning talk)
- Xinyi Tu (Plant, Soil and Microbial Sciences, Environmental Science and Policy Program) – Translating Science to Practice: Soil Health Assessment Adoption by Farmers in Michigan
2019-2020
- Isabela Borges (IBIO) – Testing the effects of inbreeding and soil legacy on legume-rhizobia mutualisms
- Lindsey Kemmerling (IBIO) – Tradeoffs among ecosystem services and functions for different methods of crop management
- Alyssa Kim (PSMS) – Long-term effect of plant diversity on soil micro-scale physics and its implications for O2 supply and N2O production
- Craig Kohn (Teacher Education) – Future of Agriculture Curriculum for Teaching Sustainability (FACTS)
- Jennifer Lai (Sociology) – Comparing environmental knowledge: The case of scientists and farmers in the Midwestern United States
- Cheyenne Lei (GESS) – Albedo induced global warming potential on biofuel cropping ecosystems
- Yingjie Li (FW) – Ecosystem services dynamics and interactions in globalized agricultural landscapes
- Corinn Rutkoski (IBIO) – Soil microbial dynamics in newly established conservation strips (talk)
- Ben Tirrell (PSMS) – Understanding SOC dynamics under different management systems in Michigan: calibration of an in-situ reflectance method for SOC pools initialization
- Xinyi Tu (PSMS) – Connecting on-farm study and long-term ecological research to improve nitrogen synchrony
- Allison Zahorec (Entomology) – Evaluating soil microarthropod community structure across a gradient of agricultural intensification
Full Year Fellowships
2018
- Heather Kittredge (IBIO) – The role of horizontal gene transfer in facilitating adaptation to extreme drying-rewetting
2017
- Riva Denny (SOC) – The Role of Environmental Knowledge in Farmer Conservation Decision-making
2016
- Susan Magnoli (PBL) – Evolution in the LTER: the role of rapid adaptation in plant population establishment
2015
- Dustin Kincaid (ZOL) – Broad-scale comparative studies of inland wetland across LTER sites
2014
- Leah Palm-Forster (AFRE) – Integrating economic and ecological models to inform policies that enhance ecosystem services in working agricultural landscapes
2013
- Placid Mpeketula (CSS) – Investigation on soil carbon accumulation, mycorrhizal community composition, soil aggregation and water infiltration along a management intensity gradient
2012
- Leilei Ruan (CSS) – International collaboration: Expanding the influence of the KBS LTER in mainland China and Taiwan
2011
- Lauren Kinsman-Costello (ZOL)
- Project 1. Phosphorus cycling: Cross-site data synthesis and collaboration
- Project 2. Leaving a data legacy: Towards graduate student data sharing
Summer Fellowships
2018
- Willam ‘B.J.’ Baule (GEO) – Field level validation for modeling the effects of precipitation variability on nitrogen loss in agricultural systems
- Heather Kittredge (IBIO) – Horizontal gene transfer of nitrogen fixation genes
- Reid Longley (MMG) – Analyzing the soy-associated microbiome and its effect on plant health
- Andrew Myers (ENT) – The role of ants in monarch butterfly egg and larval survival in grasslands
- Eeswaran Rasu (PSMS) – Physical controls and stability analysis of soil moisture across different agricultural systems
- Michael Ryskamp (PLB) – Effects of nitrogen addition on plant-virus interactions in prairie grasses
- Braeden Van Deynze (AFRE) – Why do farms custom hire for pest control? Pest population dynamics as transaction cost drivers
2017
- Tyler Hampton (EES) – Revealing a New Mechanism for Hyporheic Denitrification and Greenhouse Gas Production
- Matthew Houser (SOC) – Farmer fertilizer use and climate change: A social-ecological systems approach
- Jean René Thélusmond (CEE) – Determining the Potential of Diverse Soil Communities to Metabolize Emerging Environmental Contaminants using Metagenomics
- Prakash Kumar Jha (PSMS) – Understanding Drivers of Cropping Systems Dynamics in Southwest Michigan
- Guanyuan Shuai (EES) – Using Radarsat-2 data to quantify the effects of management on spatial variability of crop growth at the LTER and scale-up fields
2016
- Sydney Ruhala (EES) – Revealing the role of stream-groundwater interactions on watershed carbon processing
- Riva Denny (SOC) – US Farmers’ Actions and Beliefs Pertaining to Nutrient Management and Climate Change
2015
- Michelle Quigley (PSMS) – Biogeochemical cycling and microbial community composition in unconsolidated detrital accumulations in shallow aquatic ecosystems
- Elizabeth Schultheis (PLB) and Melissa Kjelvik (ZOL) – Unearthing scientific stories: Creating Data Nuggets with over 25 years of LTER data to improve K-16 quantitative literacy
2014
- Dustin Kincaid (ZOL) – Biogeochemical cycling and microbial community composition in unconsolidated detrital accumulations in shallow aquatic ecosystems
- Brendan O’Neill (PSMS) – An interdisciplinary approach for linking soil agroecosystem functions with farmer decision-making
2013
- Christina Leshko (SOC), Samantha Noll (PHL), Zachary Piso (PHL), and Ian Werkheiser (PHL) – Recognizing value pluralism among ecosystem services experts and public stakeholders
2012
- Moslem Ladoni (CSS) – Effects of cover crop on soil carbon sequestration and nitrate levels
- Lisa Stelzner (PLB) – Phenology, abundance, diversity and arrangement (scattered versus clumped) of forbs in biofuel sites classified as marginal land
2011
- Nikhil Jaikumar (CSS) – Ecophysiology of perennial grain crops
- Megan Woltz (ENT) – Effects of landscape characteristics on predatory insect abundance, movement, and resulting biocontrol of crop pests
Small Graduate Research Grants
2020
- Michael Ryskamp (PBL) – Effects of “wild” virus infection on within-plant trait heterogeneity and biotic interactions in Panicum virgatum L. (switchgrass)
- Corinn Rutkoski (KBS) – Soil microbial community composition during prairie strip establishment
2019
- Michael Ryskamp (PBL) – Wild virus effects on Panicum virgatum drought stress tolerance and plant-herbivore interactions
- Meredith Zettlemoyer (KBS) – The effect of climate warming and seed limitation on local species declines
2018
- Timothy Silberg (CSUS) – Modeling Parasitic Weed Emergence: A Systems Approach
2017
- Rachel Hestrin (Cornell) – Microbial contributions to arbuscular mycorhizal nitrogen uptake and transfer to plants
- Di Liang (KBS) – Assessing kinetics of nitrification and nitrification-derived nitrous oxide (N2O)
2016
- Dustin Kincaid (KBS) – Revealing the biogeochemical importance of flocculent sediments in shallow aquatic ecosystems
2015
- Mitchell Roth (PSMS) – The soybean microbiome and correlations to Sudden Death Syndrome incidence
- Bonnie McGill (KBS) – The missing carbon link: Are ag lime and groundwater irrigation sequestering carbon?
2014
- Erin Haramoto (Hort) – Measuring nitrogen loss in strip-tilled sweet corn with deep fertilizer banding
- Kristi Gdanetz (PLP) – The wheat microbiome across different land management practices
- Bonnie McGill (KBS) – Inorganic carbon weathering in an agroecosystem: fertilizer & groundwater irrigation effects
2013
- Kristi Gdanetz (PLP) – The wheat microbiome across different land management practices
- Christina Leshko (SOC), Samantha Noll (PHL), Zachary Piso (PHL), and Ian Werkheiser (PHL) – Recognizing Value Pluralism among Ecosystem Services Experts and Public Stakeholders
2012
- Chris Wright (MMG) – OTU richness and functional potential of decomposer fungi in Michigan agricultural soils
2010
- Brad Gottshall (University of Louisville) – Effects of disturbance on mycorrhizal mutualisms, abundance and diversity in agroecosystems
2007
- Courtney Gallaher – Soil phosphorus availability
2006
- Barbara Bahnmann (University of Western Ontario) – Basidiomycete diversity in row-crop agriculture
2005
- Amy Burgin (ZOL) – Dissimilatory nitrate reduction to ammonium in agriculturally influenced streams
- Kristin Huizinga (MMG) – Do disturbance and productivity affect proteobacterial denitrifier diversity?
- Wendy Mahaney (PBL) – How does the reestablishment of C4 grasses into C3-dominated old-fields affect belowground carbon and nitrogen cycling?
- Uri Levine (MMG) – Characterization of metnanotroph populations
- Terry Loecke (CSS) – The influence of residue aggreation on C and N cycling
- Stefan Lupold (University of Sheffield, UK) – Sperm quality and reproductive success in redwinged blackbirds (agelaius phoeniceus)
- Senthil Kumar Subramanian (CSS) – Spatial variability analysis of soil carbon in a perennial system (Populus sp.)
2003
- Stephanie Eichorst (MMG) – The ecological role of Acidobacterium in the soil environment
2002
- Adam Pitt (GLG) – Identification of N2O from soil denitrification using isotopomers
- Lisa Geason (GLG) – Perceptions of agroecology and choice of soil management practices
- Rich Smith (PBL) – Crop rotation and cover crops: Effects of increasing crop diversity on associated weed communities
- Stuart Grandy (CSS) – Soil aggregation and ecosystem function
- Stephen South (GEO) – Hyperspectral radiometric readings of agricultural crops (renewal)
- Kristin Huizinga (MMG) – The ecology of Plantomycetales in soil agroecosystems
2001
- Charles McKeown (ENT) – Response of the Asian Ladybeetle, Harmonia axyridis to the presence of soybean aphid, Aphis glycines, and Late season Coccinellid dispersion patterns and movement during harvest
- Stephen South (GEO) – Hyperspectral radiometric readings of agricultural crops