Brandon Kristy, a Ph.D. student in the Department of Integrative Biology and a member of the Evans Lab at the Kellogg Biological Station, will go to Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory, or LLNL, to study the "unseen" partners of sustainable bioenergy.Kristy’s specialty is plant science for sustainable bioenergy, where he investigates how soil microbiomes can help crops like switchgrass thrive without relying on excessive chemical fertilizers. Kristy's work underscores how MSU graduate students are leveraging national resources to turn fundamental scientific inquiry into real-world s
Prairie strip ecology, art, and advocacy in the LTER: Reflections from an LTER Fellow
Corinn Rutkoski is a graduate student in Sarah Evan's lab at the Kellogg Biological Station. She is broadly interested in the use of perennials in agricultural systems, science policy, and soil health. Her research path has been propelled by a reciprocal inspiration among ecology, conservation, and creativity. In September 2018, Lisa Schulte Moore was scheduled to give a seminar at KBS titled Prairie strips improve biodiversity and multiple ecosystem services from corn-soybean croplands. At the time, I was a technician in Sarah Evans’ lab at KBS, considering graduate school b
Understanding the role of microbial diversity in soil ecosystem functioning: Reflections from a LTER Fellow
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
A peek at life under a wheat field: Reflections from an LTER Fellow
MSU graduate researcher, Allison Zahorec, is a PhD student in Dr. Doug Landis’s lab in the Department of Entomology at Michigan State University. When one envisions a typical midwestern farm, ‘biodiversity’ is hardly the first thing that comes to mind. Compared to more natural landscapes, agricultural lands can seem like ecological dead zones. Yet even the most intensively managed corn monocultures are teeming with life belowground. A few teaspoons of soil can contain over a billion individual organisms (largely microbes), and the diversity of soil-dwelling organisms is just as impre
Microbial Communities in Long Term Research: Reflections from a Field Season at KBS
Reid Longley is a PhD candidate in the MSU Department of Microbiology & Molecular Genetics. He is a member of the Bonito Lab. Reid wrote about his research at the KBS LTER, funded by a 2018 Summer Fellowships for Long-term Ecological Research. Performing my field research at the W.K. Kellogg Biological Station (KBS) this summer was the first time I had ever been exposed to work in agriculture. Before coming to Michigan State for my PhD studies, I had not thought much about the amount of science that goes into
Researchers conduct novel wheat microbiome analysis under four management strageties.
This is an original press release from American Phytopathological Society- Nov 27th, 2017 St. Paul, Minn. (November 2017)--Different crop management strategies can produce various and noticeable effects on a crop and its yield. But what are the effects at the microbial level...not just in the roots but the entire plant? Molecular biologists Kristi Gdanetz and Frances Trail of Michigan State University sought to answer that question, developing a descriptive analysis of the wheat microbiome under four common types of management strategies: conventional, no-till, organic, and reduced