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
Between friends and foes – when is it best for plants to avoid vs. interact with soil symbionts? Reflections from an LTER fellow
Isabela Lima Borges is a PhD student in the Department of Integrative Biology at Michigan State University and a member of Sarah Fitzpatrick's lab. All organisms on Earth require others to live, and few, if any, have gone untouched by anthropogenic change in the past century. As an ecologist, I am fascinated by how plants interact with other species, and how those interactions are affected by human interventions. Given plants’ fundamental role as the basis of terrestrial food webs, these interactions are critical for most of the biological processes that humans rely upon.