Summer 2026

Summer conferences

I am going to the International Conference on Mycorrhizas in Cairns, Australia and the annual meeting of the Ecological Society of America in Salt Lake City, USA. At both conferences I will be talking about diversity in the plant-arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (AMF) symbiosis, plant dependence on AMF for nutrients, and the implications of this diversity and dependence on carbon and nutrient cycling in Miscanthus × giganteus bioenergy crop systems. I’m always happy to talk, so if you see me please pull me aside. Chances are I will already be chatting loudly and gesticulating wildly :)

SPRUCE fine-roots paper accepted!

The main paper (preprint) that I worked on while a post-doc at Oak Ridge National Laboratory was accepted into the Journal of Ecology in late June. In this paper I used minirhizotron images collected by John Latimer from a boreal Minnesota bog in the SPRUCE experiment from 2015-2021 to look at the differential responses of plants in the bog to global change. We found that shrub fine-roots are more responsive to warming than trees or herbs (mostly Maianthemum trifolium but also many sedges). We also found that these shrub and tree roots grow deeper with declining water tables, whereas herbs do not grow more deeply when these water tables drop! This is likely because herb roots have aerenchyma, air carrying structures that keep deep herb roots from drowning underneath the high water tables in boreal bogs like at SPRUCE. Incidentally, we are the first paper that I know of which reports anatomical evidence of aerenchyma in M. trifolium roots (thanks to Kyle Pearson who sent the roots!). We also found that while elevated CO does not strongly control fine-root production at the monthly scale, it does cause fine-root biomass of shrubs to increase more strongly with warming! This is a very similar response reported for aboveground biomass by Paul Hanson and others, where shrubs are increasing with warming and elevated CO at the expense of herbaceous vegetation. While above and belowground biomass aren’t really separate from one another (all else equal, bigger plants should have more roots) the findings that we report here, and some cool new work that Verity Salmon is leading, does suggest that ‘shrubification’ in the SPRUCE bog is being driven by the responses of these shrubs belowground to changing nutrient availabilities with global change.

None of this work would have been possible without Joanne Childs, who tragically passed away in June 2024. Joanne is a friend to all of us on who worked together on this paper, whether cracking jokes in the field and lab, sharing sage advice over drinks, or arguing over politics at the lunch table where she and her husband Steve held court. Joanne is arguably the most knowledgeable person for identifying roots, with over 20 years of handling roots - either physically or as images - at Oak Ridge National Laboratory. I am incredibly lucky for the brief time that I got to share with her. May her memory be a blessing.

Spring 2026

MiscAMFus project initiated

I’m excited this spring because Emily Protain and others in the Brzostek lab and I are putting out bags to estimate arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal (AMF) production and it’s relationship to Miscanthus yield, nutrient uptake, and soil C sequestration. We’re collaborating with the Morrissey Lab at WVU and making use of their set of Miscanthus plots where they manipulate nutrient inputs across a gradient of coal mining disturbance.