Category: Research
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Prescribed fire and soil microbial communities in a native perennial grassland
Through a collaboration with SPAWAR (Dawn Lawson), SERG (Tom Zink), the USGS and others, we had the opportunity to study the effects of a prescribed burn experiment on soil microbial communities in a perennial grassland on San Clemente Island. Prescribed fire is a potential tool for controlling exotic annual grasses and restoring the native perennial…
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Art and Science of Snow Microbiology
Our Art-science residency in the Finnish Arctic culminated in a poster at the 2017 AGU meeting in New Orleans and two exhibitions in San Diego in 2018. Our AGU Poster describes a snow microbiology research project and how the data were translated into oil paintings by Kim Reasor, shown below (click on her name to see…
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Iron reduction in soils of the Alaskan Arctic
From 2009-2012, we were funded by the NSF to study the importance of iron (Fe(III)) reduction as a dominant anaerobic process in soils of the Arctic Coastal Plain, near Barrow, Alaska. Fe(III) can serve as an alternative electron acceptor for anaerobic respiration when oxygen is depleted. What is special about Fe(III) is that it generally…
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We’ve got Acidobacteria
Acidobacteria are highly abundant in most soil bacterial communities, but are rarely cultured in the lab. The ones that have been cultured grow very slowly and generally require specialized growth media. Acidobacteria probably represent the ultimate K-selected microbe: they very gradually build up populations and then hang on forever, dividing once a month or so…