Space-for-time substitution approaches in ecology do work! (at least in temperate grasslands) www.nature.com/articles/s41...
Hannah B. Shulman ₊˚ʚ 🌀 ₊˚✧ ﾟ.
@hannahshulman.bsky.social
Microbial ecologist 🦠🌱🏔️🌎🌀 Post Doc @ UTK EEB Kivlin lab, studying root-fungal phenology and nutrient cycling www.hannahshulman.com
In our latest paper, just published in @natcomms.nature.com we show that soil conditions, landscape structure & land-use change shape global soil pathogenic fungal diversity. Landscape complexity and crops increase diversity, while grass and tree cover reduce it www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A poem I wrote while doing fieldwork at high-elevation ecosystems (@rmblscience.bsky.social) is now published online by Poets for Science! poetsforscience.org/sub-alpine-o...
Sub-alpine omens - Poets for Science
Three-legged cow— Omen of endurance, of merciful husbandry, of balance learned on the ridges knife-edge, moving through the wound. Wolf at the treeline— Omen of return, of old laws testing new borders...
poetsforscience.org
Nutrient limitation shapes functional traits of mycorrhizal fungi and phosphorus-cycling bacteria across an elevation gradient #mSystems by @hannahshulman.bsky.social et al journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...
Nutrient limitation shapes functional traits of mycorrhizal fungi and phosphorus-cycling bacteria across an elevation gradient | mSystems
Phosphorus (P) limits plant productivity in high-elevation ecosystems, yet the microbial networks that mobilize P, including arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi and phosphorus-cycling bacteria (PCBs), remain under-characterized in these nutrient-poor soils. We show that across a 10,00-m elevation gradient, AM fungi and P-cycling gene assemblages shift predictably with pH, organic carbon, and phosphate availability. Higher elevations, with less available P, select for stress-tolerant AM fungal taxa and PCB strategies geared toward mineral solubilization, while low-elevation sites favor root colonization by AM fungi and organic P mineralization. These results suggest that nutrient limitation can constrain microbial community assembly in consistent ways across landscapes. High mountain soils are low in P and rely on a network of underground AM fungi and PCB to deliver nutrients to plants. This study shows how those underground relationships reorganize with elevation and how climate change could collapse long-standing microbial strategies by pushing high-elevation ecosystems toward lowland conditions. As soils warm and dry, the microbial scaffolding that supports alpine plant life may become increasingly unstable.
journals.asm.org
I'm so enchanted by this new record, "Mycorrhizal Music" by Ess Whiteley, a composer and grad student at UC San Diego. My favorite track is "Whispered Messages in Tapestried Fields of Fluid Motion." metronrecords.bandcamp.com/album/mycorr...
Mycorrizhal Music, by Ess Whiteley
7 track album
metronrecords.bandcamp.com
Our new study linking bacterial and AM fungal phosphorus cycling is out now in mSystems! 🦠🏔️ This work was done by a great team based at @rmblscience.bsky.social, including @skivlin.bsky.social and @aclassen.bsky.social doi.org/10.1128/msys...
Nutrient limitation shapes functional traits of mycorrhizal fungi and phosphorus-cycling bacteria across an elevation gradient | mSystems
Phosphorus (P) limits plant productivity in high-elevation ecosystems, yet the microbial networks that mobilize P, including arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi and phosphorus-cycling bacteria (PCBs), r...
doi.org
Boxplots are great when different data distributions matter to your research question, but they’re used a lot (by default) in #rstats when the goal is to show treatment means. If your model focuses on mean responses, a simple mean ± SD (or CI) bar plot is nicer 😗
Tennessee red valencia peanuts grown in my garden in knoxville, with beautiful nodules of rhizobia 🥜🤎
Are you an ecologist who lives for fieldwork on wild, rugged terrain? If you dread returning to the lab where your personal style is stifled by required PPE, fear not. Introducing the GLEET™, a BSL-1 compliant Glove for your Feet, for seamless transition from field to lab.
Labeling chambers are up and running so these dual-mycorrhizal plants are incorporating 13-CO2 to measure how much they give their fungal mutualists
🧬🌽 Happy Transposon Day! 🌽🧬 Today we celebrate the birthday of Barbara McClintock - scientist extraordinaire and discoverer of jumping genes. Still the only woman to have an unshared Nobel Prize in the biomedical sciences #TransposonDay2025
Simple & elegant figure from Nagahashi et al 2010 showing synergistic effects of root exudates on hyphal branching in Gigaspora rosea link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...
Integrating ‘cry for help’ strategies for sustainable agriculture #plantscience
Integrating ‘cry for help’ strategies for sustainable agriculture
Plants recruit specific soil microbes through a sophisticated ‘cry for help’ strategy to mitigate environmental stresses. Recent advances highlight the potential of leveraging this mechanism to develop microbe-based approaches for enhancing crop health, but challenges remain in refining the criteria and conceptual frameworks to effectively investigate and harness these plant–microbe interactions.
dlvr.it
Cool new paper about diversity effects on mycorrizal resource exchange out in new phyt!!!
I had a great time and learned a lot at the DOE earth system science meeting this past week. Thank you everyone who came to chat with me about our fungal phenology experiment and to all the great presenters ✨💚🌎
You know the way we all talk about leveraging 'omics information to improve ecosystem/biogeochemical model performance - well here's a step in that direction - led by Zhen Li integrating across many scientific teams to make this happen www.nature.com/articles/s41...
A framework for integrating genomics, microbial traits, and ecosystem biogeochemistry - Nature Communications
Microbes drive the Earth’s biogeochemical cycles. Here, Li et al. present a framework for integrating genome-inferred microbial kinetic traits into ecosystem mechanistic models, and use it to benchmar...
nature.com
Cool paper by Kodama et al...a bryophyte makes Strigolactones (SLs) to recruit mycorrhiza, but doesn't use SL as a growth hormone, showing that SLs first evolved in the ancestor of land plants to initiate symbiosis. Love being reminded that symbiosis is everything. www.nature.com/articles/s41...
An ancestral function of strigolactones as symbiotic rhizosphere signals - Nature Communications
Strigolactones (SLs) regulate angiosperm development and promote symbiosis with arbuscular mycorrhizae. Here the authors show that bryosymbiol, an SL present in bryophytes and angiosperms, promotes AM...
nature.com
want 2 combine datasets produced by different 'omics methods (eg, 16S + ITS) & analyze interkingdom interactions? 🦠🍄 Brunner et al 2024 show that clr-normalizing data separately + accommodating sparsity reduce error, then describe this error "signature" so you can spot it doi.org/10.1093/isme...
Hey BlueSky! I made a starter pack for folks working on mycorrhizal symbioses. LMK who else to include! go.bsky.app/285P8Tn
Happy valentine’s weeping hemlock day 💚💚
Continental divides separate one drainage basin from another. Here is a gorgeous view of the continental divides in North America. Source: buff.ly/3vKHwq7
Science is a team sport played against ignorance 🧪
This is my 2x6 soil corer. There are many like it, but this one is mine. My 2x6 soil corer is my best friend. It is my life. I must master it as I must master my life.
Fungal endophytes could potentially promote plant resilience to climate change. However, across 3 warming experiments (differing in age/species/climate), warming disrupted plant-fungal endophyte symbiosis, with stronger effects in leaves than roots. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...
If you're a scientist that serves on an NSF panel that got cancelled today, I'd love to talk to you about it for an NPR story. DM, email or reach out on signal.
please share: We seek a postdoctoral researcher to join a collaborative team of ecologists in studying the integrated nature of forest functions that are critical for productivity, water and energy usage, and nutrient cycling.
📢 New paper in Ecology Letters on assigning Y-yield and A-acquisition strategies of our YAS framework using genomics data; genome size came out as a significant factor. Led by Xingjie Wu, Jingjing Peng and Shuo Jiao. doi.org/10.1111/ele....
A Global Relationship Between Genome Size and Encoded Carbon Metabolic Strategies of Soil Bacteria
We combined a global-scale meta-analysis of 2650 genomes, information on whole-genome sequencing, and a continental-scale metagenomic field study. We found that genome size was tightly associated wit...
doi.org
