UNH faculty honored as winter break begins

Check it out: UNH science faculty were recognized as being among the best researchers in the US!  It's especially nice to see the part at the bottom about how Dr. Serita Frey had the highest-cited paper.  Serita is also a fabulous professor (I took Soil Ecology with her this past semester) and I'm hoping to work with her during my future research here at UNH... It seems I'll be learning from the best!

As winter break begins, I want to take a moment to wish everyone a happy holiday.  I'll be celebrating Chanukah, Solstice, and Christmas (in that order) this year, so I have most of my seasonally-festive bases covered.  Otherwise, if you need to find me over break, look no further than my computer where I'll be reading as much as I can and working on my experiment (see my last post).  I'll also sink my teeth into Joshua Schimel's book, Writing Science: How to Write Papers that Get Cited and Proposals That Get Funded, which my advisor just gave me; it looks quite well-written (one should hope so!) and I'm looking forward to perusing its words of wisdom.

Oh, and did I mention I'm heading to Puerto Rico for a quick vacation?  This winter break is going to be epic!!

Nearing the end of my first semester...

The first semester in my Ph.D. program has been going great!  I'm just one final exam away from finishing my classes.  Most of my peers only take 1 or 2 classes per semester, but I wanted to start knocking credits off early--I have to complete 36 during my program--so I took 3 classes this time around.

1. Ethics in Research and Scholarship, which fulfilled a requirement of my program, as well as a college-wide requirement for Ph.D. students.  It's a complex topic, and this class covered some foundations in a broad range of ethical issues related to conducting research, many of which I had never considered before,
2.  Research Methodology & Statistics I, taught by an excellent prof from the Psychology department who really made the subject come alive.  Although I took a Stats class as an undergrad, it's through this class that I feel I'm really starting to understand it.
3. Soil Ecology, another great class taught by my (I hope) future committee member Serita Frey, all about the microbes and other organisms that live in the soil, their interactions, life strategies, and involvement in terrestrial--and global--ecological processes, including carbon and nitrogen cycling (my favorite!).

I'll be keeping busy over winter break setting up a greenhouse experiment I'd like to start as soon as possible.  If I heard him right, my advisor has given me the go-ahead to look into doing a metagenomic study as part of my experiment, which is an exciting and cutting-edge method of understanding which microbes are in the soil and what roles they're playing, which we can get at by determining what genes they carry and which ones they actively use.  I'm also scouring the scientific literature on the interactions between plant roots and soil microbes, and how these interactions affect soil nutrients, especially nitrogen.  If I can synthesize our existing knowledge about this topic in an interesting conceptual framework, I'll be able to write a nice review paper and try to get it published!

Next semester I'll be hitting the ground running with three more classes... Research Methodology & Statistics II (after which I'll be ready for some more complicated stuff... I'm thinking a Multivariate Stats class...), Microbial Ecology & Evolution (definitely looking forward to that), and my advisor Stuart's "hot topics" graduate seminar on soil carbon (should be really interesting, and I'm looking forward to taking a class with him).

Oh, and check it out: I put together a webpage for my lab!  It's pretty basic, but it gets the job done.  Visit the Soil Biogeochemistry & Fertility Lab and let me know what you think.

Digging in the Midwest, NH seacoast, and chickens!

Well, it has been a fun-filled July and August!

I got to sally forth from the lab to accompany two postdocs on a trip to the Kellogg Biological Station's Long-Term Ecological Research site on cropping biodiversity. Our mission, which we chose to accept, was:

1. To boldly install soil mesocosms attached to lysimeters (check out the photo below). An intact soil core in the mesocosm is re-buried in its original hole; in another month or so, our postdoc will add wheat litter with isotopically-labelled carbon to the soil surface in the mesocosm, which will allow him to trace where the carbon goes--into microbes, attached to clay particles, in aggregates, in molecules of interesting/complex chemistry, etc. Any carbon lost by leaching out during rainfall events will be caught in the lysimeter.
   
   
The mesocosm (on the right) is attached by tubing to the lysimeter housing (center) in a plot currently under soybean rotation. A control mesocosm not attached to a lysimeter is on the left. Those are my arms!


2. To boldly gather roots and shoots from biofuel crops including corn, switchgrass, big bluestem, and miscanthus, as well as a big cooler full of soil, for our other postdoc's lab incubation experiment to look at decomposition dynamics of above- and below-ground residues.
   
   I'm dwarfed by this stand of miscanthus, which is native to Europe and is even taller than this at full height!

It was great to get out into the field for the first time. It was hard work digging so many holes (and even harder to pound the mesocosms in...), but rewarding to be a part of.

Digging in the dirt!

Aside from that, I helped out for a couple of days with fellow PhD-student's enzyme assay (which mostly involved making litter slurries and pipetting into hundreds of 96-well plates), and have mostly spent my time reading textbooks and papers. Recent and future search topics include: priming; P limitation in agriculture; Things Written By People In My Lab; soil fungal and bacterial niches; plant-soil interactions; scale-up; spatial statistics; and soil fauna and food webs.

In other news, New Hampshire has been treating me well! I took myself to the NH seashore on Sunday for the afternoon, lounging about in a true summery American fashion.

Beach!

I also had my first pet-sitting gig this weekend, caring for some local chickens!

When I let them out of the coop in the morning, the chickens gleefully guzzled water and roamed throughout the yard

What controls soil processes?

Reflections upon reading "The Biology of Soil" by Richard Bardgett...

What controls soil processes?  Of course the answer has to be:

It depends!

There is never an easy explanation, is there?  I suppose that is what makes something worth studying, though.

Also, it seems to make soil (along with deep ocean) one of our Earth's final frontiers.  Have I stumbled into an Ecologist's goldmine?  I hope so!