I am an ecologist, data scientist, and bioinformatician interested in microbial ecology, plant ecology, plant-microbe interactions, and biogeochemistry, particularly in the face of climate change. I have studied the microbiomes of air, snow, soils, sediments, roots, leaves, seeds, and guts!
Postdoctoral Work
Current projects - understanding methane fluxes in restored and unrestored salt ponds in the San Francisco Bay area using metagenomics and metabolomics, understanding how salinity affects microbial communities and methane fluxes in estuarine wetlands. SMARTFARMS project - understanding drivers of greenhouse gas emissions on rice and corn fields.
Previous postdoc projects at the University of Colorado (Suding Lab, Schmidt Lab, Fierer Lab) -PanAf project: Understanding the ecological and evolutionary drivers of the chimpanzee gut microbiome -Effects of herbicides on soil microbial communities -Effects of vicuña latrines on ecosystem development the high Andes of Perú -Developing a generalized framework for describing and understanding the effects of longer, warmer summers on ecosystems
Graduate Work (Suding and Schmidt Labs, University of Colorado)
Dissertation Research -For my dissertation research I studied how climate change, particularly earlier snowmelt may enable plants to colonize high elevation areas previously devoid of plant life. I also examined how soil microbes may facilitate or limit this plant movement. Through five chapters of research, I demonstrated that 1) tundra plants are colonizing previously unvegetated areas, 2) soil bacterial distributions can help predict plant distributions, 3) fungal mutualists such as arbuscular mycorrhizae and dark septate endophytes are present but patchily distributed at the upper elevation range of plant life in Colorado, 4) soil microbial community composition in unvegetated soils can influence the growth of colonizing plants and 5) plant litter inputs to unvegetated soils can alter soil microbial communities and feed back on plant growth.
Fungal Phenology -In summer 2017, we sampled roots from 4 forb species over time to see how levels of mycorrhizae and dark septate fungi changed over the course of the growing season
Implications of vascular plant colonization of moss-dominated areas -In collaboration with Joey Knelman, I studied how soil bacterial communities, enzyme activities, and soil nutrients change as vascular plants outcompete mosses as growing season lengthens
Other Suding Lab Projects -As a member of the Suding Lab, I worked on a number of other projects. These include: monitoring vegetation change in snowbed areas, impacts of warming, N deposition, and snowpack on vegetation, and the effects of dominant species removal on productivity, community composition, and diversity.
Niwot LTER Projects -I helped establish a large early snowmelt experiment, using black sand added to snowpack, across different habitat types from to examine biotic responses to early snowmelt. This project is ongoing!
Undergraduate Work
Methane production in coarse woody debris -In collaboration with Dr. Mark Bradford's lab at Yale University, I completed a year long Honors Thesis, in which I found that high levels of methane are produced in the heartwood of trees as they decompose.
Impacts of N deposition on alpine plants and soils, and their potential to recover. -In collaboration with Dr. Bill Bowman, I completed a 10 week research project on Niwot Ridge, in which I found that plant and soils showed little recovery from the effects of N deposition, which include changes in species composition, loss of base cations, and acidification of soil.