Project description Decomposition – the recycling of nutrients from dead organic matter (e.g., plant litter, fungal and bacterial necromass) – is key for ecosystem productivity in terrestrial ecosystems. It liberates carbon and nutrients that can be used to produce new, living biomass. Not all organic matter is fully decomposed and, thus, released back to the READ MORE
Tag: FUNDER
UPCOMING – MSc thesis: Quantifying the functional potential of soil microbial communities
Project description Soil microbial communities perform a multitude of ecosystem functions in the soil ecosystem (Crowther et al. 2019). Quantifying the functional potential of microbial communities is useful for studying microbially mediated ecosystem processes such as carbon (Trivedi et al. 2016) and nitrogen cycling (Zhang et al. 2013), how they respond to environmental and ecosystem READ MORE
MSc thesis: Soil bacterial and fungal abundance in response to plant removals across climatic gradients
Project description Climate change entails global and local shifts in temperature and precipitation, with consequences for biotic communities in above- and belowground ecosystems (Jansson and Hofmockel 2020). Soil bacteria and fungi are two major groups of microorganisms constituting a large part of the soil microbiome. Both groups include partners and parasites of plants as well READ MORE
Research is not done in a flash in the best of times. Fieldwork, data analyzes and writing take time. But this time it took over ten years, two doctorates and one baby to get there. We have just published a new article in the scientific journal Ecography. The article describes how grass and grass-like species, READ MORE
The belowground life of roots in alpine grasslands (Funder)
Often when we characterize plant growth and development, we focus on the above-ground, but less-so the below-ground. Here we focus on the important alpine grasslands of Norway, and we take a dive below to better understand how these communities are utilizing resources such as water and nutrients below-ground, including: 1) Does the biomass of roots READ MORE
Postdoc position in soil microbe functional ecology (Deadline passed)
We seek a postdoc in the FUNDER project, which will assess and disentangle the direct effects of climate from the indirect effects, mediated through biotic interactions, on the diversity and whole-ecosystem functioning of the plant−soil food web. To achieve this, we use a powerful macroecological experimental approach to quantify the impacts of vegetation diversity on READ MORE
MSc thesis: Plant community responses to the direct and indirect effects of climate in the Vestland Climate grid
Background Alpine grasslands are vulnerable to climate change, and are currently changing rapidly in both plant functional group dominance (1) and species distributions (2). These biotic shifts contribute to indirect effect of climate change through influencing biotic interactions (3,4). Indeed, research is still needed on the effect of climate on long-term vegetation dynamics (5). Our READ MORE
Two positions available in new FUNDER project
FUNDER got funded! We are excited to start exploring the Direct and indirect climate impacts on the biodiversity and Functioning of the UNDERground ecosystem this spring. To that end, we are now recruiting a PhD and a Postdoctoral research fellow. The PhD position focuses on the roles of alpine soil mesofauna (nematodes, micro-arthropods) and READ MORE