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Soil systems – the challenges of complexity and scale
Soils are complex systems, in which physical, geochemical and biological processes interact in aggregate structures situated in dynamically shifting air- and water-filled spaces. It is difficult to adequately sample soil properties and to model processes related to those soil measurements. These challenges were discussed in a stimulating three-day conference on Complex Soils Systems in Berkeley a few weeks ago. Attendees came from an incredible diversity of backgrounds with a common interest in tackling issues in soil science. The need to better understand soils was motivated by the importance of soil processes in climate and for figuring out “How to feed the soil and the planet?” in the anthropocene – a question posed…
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Undergraduate Researcher Shersingh’s SURGE Experience
Congratulations to visiting undergraduate researcher Shersingh Joseph Tumber-Davila on completing and thriving in the demanding eight-week Summer Undergraduate Research in Geoscience and Engineering (SURGE) program! Shersingh came to the Welander lab with a strong background in environmental research (news article) from his home institution of the University of New Hampshire. SURGE is a competitive earth science research and graduate school preparation program, which is specifically designed to recruit students of diverse backgrounds from other universities across the country. I was amazed at the number of activities the program had for the students including GRE test preparation, faculty seminars, career and grad school panels, and field trips. This was all while performing graduate-level research including…
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ISME conference on “the power of the small”
Last week I attended ISME 14 (International Symposium on Microbial Ecology) in Copenhagen, Denmark. It was a delight to see the city – its juxtaposed giant modern, cool, sterile buildings surrounding the historic old city. More of a delight was unexpectedly running into friends from the MBL Microbial Diversity summer school (2010) and realizing they are now my colleagues. The conference itself was quite good. I appreciated the range of content from very big picture and abstract to focused experimental projects. One message I took away from the community was a sort of -omics backlash, or perhaps whiplash, to the idea that generating more and more -omics data is the…
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I survived the AGU 2011 Fall meeting
I just returned to Boston after the six weeks of travelling. My two weeks in California, filled with conferences and colleagues, was quite different from the intensive and somewhat isolated period spent in India. First stop was San Diego, where I attended the 44th Meeting of Advanced Global Atmospheric Gases Experiment (AGAGE) Scientists and Cooperating Networks at the Scripps Institute of Oceanography in La Jolla. Anita Ganesan’s instrument in Darjeeling may pave the way for the first AGAGE site in India, so the crowd was eager to hear her describe our success in deploying her instrument. Her dedicated and diligent work is paying off as she is collecting some of…
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How much energy does H2 supply to soil microbes?
I presented a poster at the at the Ecology of Soil Microorganisms conference in Prague, 2011 on the role of soil microorganisms in dominating the fate of atmospheric molecular hydrogen (H2). Recent work has linked atmospheric H2 uptake to a novel high-affinity [NiFe]-hydrogenase expressed in active Streptomyces sp. cells, and is perhaps not driven by abiotic hydrogenases as was previously thought. Consequently, atmospheric hydrogen may be a 60-85 Tg yr-1 energetic supplement to microbes in Earth’s uppermost soil horizon. To understand the role of this supplement to the soil microbial ecology, this work explores the following questions: What is the importance of atmospheric H2 energy to soil microbial communities relative to…
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Is H2 an upper atmospheric tracer?
I presented a poster at the 2010 American Geophysical Union General Assembly on H2 as a “mesotracer.” A rare glimpse into the chemical and dynamical evolution of the Arctic polar vortex is provided by a suite of in situ balloonborne measurements. A set of mesospheric tracers observed in the late vortex validate theoretical mesospheric chemical profiles, which is especially valuable for the case of mesospheric H2. Early vortex mesospheric profiles are constructed to explain mixing in tracer-tracer space. Expanding a model to incorporate three mesotracers, H2, CO, and SF6, instead of only one, will increase our ability to constrain estimates of the amount of mesospheric air that descended to stratospheric altitudes…