Category: Mediterranean
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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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Differential responses of native and exotic coastal sage scrub plant species to N additions and the soil microbial community
JDPE student, Francis Bozzolo, published part of his dissertation in Plant and Soil. Part of the motivation for this study was that the dominant shrubs of Coastal Sage Scrub ecosystems are generally clumped in patches, as in the photo above. Do they partition N by depth or chemical form? What happens to N partitioning when…
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Rainfall Manipulation Experiment at SMER
We are in the 4th year of an NSF-funded rainfall manipulation experiment at Santa Margarita Ecological Reserve, part of SDSU’s Field Station Program. The experiment is investigation the interactive effects of plant functional type (native shrubs vs. exotic annual species) and altered rainfall. This is a collaboration with Dr. Elsa Cleland at UCSD. Our lab…
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Elevated CO2 stimulates soil fungal diversity through increased fine root production…
In collaboration with the Global Change Research Group (GCRG) and Cheryl Kuske at LANL, we studied the effects of free air CO2 enrichment (FACE) on soil fungal communities in a chaparral ecosystem. We found that elevated CO2 increased root production, which led to an increase in fungal diversity in these soils. The results were published in Global Change…