DERT

I am an Environmental Life Scientist Ph.D. candidate at the Drylands Ecosystems Lab. Currently, I am interested in the relationship between root functional traits, drylands soil properties, and restoration. I am especially curious about how root traits are affected by soil conditions created through restoration processes and vice-versa. Moreover, I am interested in developing new ways to measure root traits with computational models. I am also passionate about art, poetry, and social justice. I hope to increase my curiosity in these and more areas through this Ph.D. journey. Moreover, I hope to help increase knowledge of the Earth system and solutions to ensure a sustainable, fair, and equitable future.

I am a first year PhD student. I am interested in microbial ecology in dryland systems. My previous research projects have developed my interest in this particular discipline. My past work has included  assessment of the recovery of hypolithic cyanobacteria after mining disturbance and my Master’s project focused how fire history affects soil nutrients, soil carbon, and soil respiration in a semi-arid savanna. For my PhD project, I am investigating how plants influence on soil biogeochemistry and taxonomic and functional diversity of soil microbial communities in the hyper-arid Namib Desert. Describing plant influences on soil biogeochemistry and soil microbial communities will help us to understand how ecological functions may be altered with future climate change in hyper-arid systems, in order to inform better management and biogeochemical models.

I am an ecologist studying the impact of climate change and land use change on ecosystem resilience through the perspective of soil. I grew up in Durango, Colorado and completed my B.S. in Environmental Science: Ecosystem Analysis and Assessment with a minor in Soil Science at the University of Vermont. I have worked in many diverse ecosystems including the Peruvian Amazon, anthropogenic wetlands, organic temperate and tropical agriculture, the Chihuahua Desert, and coastal rainforests of Costa Rica. My past work focused on understanding the mechanisms of—and capacity for—carbon sequestration in soil. In 2021 I was awarded the National Science Foundation’s Graduate Research Fellowship. My current work in the Dryland Ecosystems Research Team seeks to elucidate the drivers and mechanisms of soil carbon stability in dryland soils through a microbially explicit lens. My graduate work is rooted in a continual acknowledgement that minority identity groups and local community action are the foundation of a knowledgeable and sustainable future.

I am and Environmental Life Sciences Ph.D. student, broadly interested in learning about how plants physiologically change in response environmental stressors related to climate change, such as increased air temperatures and drought, and how those small-scale changes compound into larger impacts at the population, community, and ecosystem level. The main question I am currently interested in is what are the thermal boundaries for plants species exposed to high temperatures and is there plasticity in those related mechanisms. I am studying the temporal changes in leaf heat acclimation (daily, weekly, and seasonally) across a large range of species, the boundaries of thermal tolerance where leaf recovery is and is not possible, and incorporating physiological response data with traditional species distribution modeling to create mechanistic niche models for ecologically important plant taxa

I study how carbon and nutrients cycle through plants, soils, and the atmosphere. Much my work addresses how these cycles respond to human-caused changes in the environment, such as climate change and changing human land use. My work is primarily based in arid and semi-arid environments. These 'drylands' contain a large and rapidly increasing portion of the world's human population, particularly in developing nations where human livelihoods are often tightly linked to sustainable use of drylands. My current projects include work in drylands sites in Arizona, New Mexico, eastern Oregon, Australia and Namibia.