Open post

Congrats Peter!

Congratulations to Peter Pellitier for completing and defending his dissertation, Ectomycorrhizal fungi differentially obtain N derived from soil organic matter: implications for community assembly and forest response to climate change on June 29th. Thanks to his committee for all their support, especially during this time, Don Zak (chair), Deborah Goldberg, Ines Ibáñez and Tim James....

Open post

Don Zak named ESA Fellow

Don has been named as a 2020 Ecological Society of America Fellow (announced here). This fellowship recognizes ESA members who have made “outstanding contributions to … ecological knowledge”. They are elected for life come from all fields of science that are connected to ESA. One other UM Faculty was elected this year and two other...

Open post

Congrats Wes!

Congratulations to Wes Bickford for successfully defending his dissertation, Plant invasions and microbes: the interactive effects of plant-associated microbes on invasiveness of Phragmites australis, in December. Also congrats to his committee Deborah Goldberg (co-chair), Don Zak (co-chair), Ines Ibáñez, Tim James and Kurt P. Kowalski (USGS). Wes has been one of the busiest grad students...

Open post

Peter’s bark paper is out!

Peter and Sydney’s paper on the endophyte microbiome of bark, titled “Environmental filtering structures fungal endophyte communities in tree bark” is out online in Molecular Ecology. In it they examine the inner bark of different tree species to determine if bark is a reservoir for fungal groups (spores, latent fungi) or structures the community as...

Open post

Ecology paper online now

Another Ecology paper for the Soils lab! Don’s paper, “Anthropogenic N deposition, fungal gene expression, and an increasing soil carbon sink in the Northern Hemisphere”, in Ecology is now online. It discusses how the expression of fungal class II peroxidases were down regulated under experimentally increased N deposition and how this impacts greater soil C...

Open post

Pedobiologia paper out

A new paper is out for the Zak lab! A former EEB PhD student, Huijie Gan, has published her work on oribatid mites and how their communities are structured in Pedobiologia. The manuscript, titled “Scale dependency of dispersal limitation, environmental filtering and biotic interactions determine the diversity and composition of oribatid mite communities”, can be...

Open post

Ectomycorrhizal Fungi and the Enzymatic Liberation of Nitrogen from Soil Organic Matter: Ecosystem Processes and Underlying Molecular Mechanisms

The rate at which plants photosynthesize, thereby capturing carbon from the atmosphere, is limited by a number of factors including the availability of nitrogen (N) in soil. Past research has presumed that plants exclusively use inorganic nitrogen (ammonium, nitrate) for growth. Current work suggests that plants may have access to additional types of nitrogen in...

Scroll to top