Isabela Borges is a graduate student in Sarah Fitzpatrick's lab in the Integrative Biology department at Michigan State University. Isabela won the J.S. Karling Graduate Student Research Award from the Botanical Society of America for her work on plant inbreeding on the legume-rhizobia mutualism. She is broadly interested in the feedbacks between community ecology and contemporary evolution, and their consequences for the persistence of small populations. Summer 2021 was a busy one. When I first proposed to conduct an experiment on two thousand plants, that just seemed like a nice large
Disentangling the complex effects of climate change on above and belowground communities: Reflections from an LTER Fellow
Graduate researcher, Moriah Young, is a Ph.D. student in Dr. Phoebe Zarnetske’s lab at Michigan State University. The lab uses open top chambers (OTCs) to study how biotic interactions and climate change directly and indirectly affect community structure and function at the KBS LTER. Climate change is a pressing threat to ecosystems around the world. From warmer temperatures to more unpredictable rainfall, climate change has shown to have a myriad of effects on ecosystems. Most research has focused on direct effects of climate change on species. For example, how does warming
My summer of science (fiction): Reflections from an undergraduate researcher
Each summer the KBS LTER supports students to participate in the Research Experiences for Undergraduates (REU) program, funded by the NSF. This is part of a larger undergraduate research program at KBS. Tori Niewohner is majoring in Environmental Science at Western Washington University. She wrote about her REU experience working with Kileigh Welshofer a graduate student in Dr. Pheobe Zarnetske's lab at MSU. ~~~~~ After my first day at the field site I would be working at for the summer, I attempted to describe it to someone. “Well, it’s a field of hexagonal structures