Collage of field and glasshouse research: sampling peat cores at the SPRUCE experiment, a close-up of mycorrhizal roots, a mushroom in boreal forest, spruce branches with cones in an experimental chamber, and Sören in a glasshouse.

Sören Eliot Weber

Plant biologist working on the exchange of plant carbon for microbial nutrients — and what that exchange means for ecosystems under global change.

Postdoctoral Researcher · West Virginia University · CABBI

Sören Eliot Weber

Plants get most of their nutrients by trading carbon with fungi. I want to know how much they get back for what they spend, what governs that return, and what it adds up to at the scale of an ecosystem.

My work follows one question across three scales — from mesocosms where I can trace carbon and phosphorus with radioisotopes, through field manipulations in agricultural and natural systems, to process-based models that project the consequences. Earth system models still treat the carbon-for-nutrient exchange as a fixed efficiency term. It isn't fixed: it varies with the traits of the plant and the functional type of the fungus, and that variation impacts carbon and nutrient cycling.

I'm currently a postdoctoral researcher at West Virginia University with the DOE Center for Advanced Bioenergy and Bioproducts Innovation, working on plant–microbe interactions in bioenergy crops. Before that I was at Oak Ridge National Laboratory on the SPRUCE whole-ecosystem warming experiment, and I did my PhD at the University of Zürich on carbon-for-phosphorus exchange between plants and arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi.

I am on the faculty job market. See my research, publications, and CV, or get in touch.

Functional diversity of plants and AMF

Plants and mycorrhizal fungi differ in what they trade and what they cost. I study these differences and incorporate them into process-based and Earth system models.

Bioenergy systems

How miscanthus, AMF, and free-living microbes together govern yield, nutrient uptake, and soil carbon — down to 100 cm.

Carbon and nutrient cycling

Radio- and stable isotope tracing of what plants pay and receive, from single partners to diverse fungal communities.

Methods

14C, 32P and 33P tracers · large field manipulations · mixed-effect and process-based models (FUN-BioCROP, CORPSE, E3SM/ELM).