Welcome to the DEEP (digging into elements, ecosystems, and plants) lab at Yale!
Science that digs beneath the surface
Our lab studies how plants and microbes interact with soils and nutrients to shape ecosystem structure and function, mostly in temperate and tropical forests. We are interested in 1) what drives variation in soils across space and time, 2) how nutrient availability modulates plant growth in response to disturbance and climate change, 3) how plants use different strategies in response to nutrient limitation (and how this varies across taxa), and 4) how plants interact with microbes (such as mycorrhizal fungi and bacteria) to modify their soil environments and acquire nutrients.
How do plants and plant communities address and overcome nutrient limitation?
Tropical forests are often situated on highly weathered, nutrient-depleted soils, but are often some of the most productive ecosystems in the world. How do plants and plant communities address nutrient limitation? How do they alter their nutrient use and acquisition? How can we better predict the type and extent of nutrient limitation across time and space?
Trees can interact with mycorrhizal fungi, nitrogen-fixing bacteria, and free-living bacteria in the rhizosphere. What drives these relationships, and what are the carbon costs relative to the nutrient yield? We use inoculation studies, nutrient manipulation, and isotopic labeling to address these questions.
How do plants interact with microbes to acquire nutrients?
How do disturbances affect nutrient availability, and how do ecosystems recover?
Tropical forests face rapid rates of land-use change. At Fazenda Tanguro in Mato Grosso, Brazil, we studied how forest fires affected the availability of key nutrients, such as nitrogen, phosphorus, and molybdenum, and what role nitrogen fixation played in forest recovery.
How do nutrients act as a lever on plant biomass and soil carbon?
How can we better predict the type and extent of nutrient limitation across time and space? How do soil nutrients modulate allocation of carbon belowground, and how does that impact soil microbial communities and function?
