"Over the past couple years, my students and I have been working across timescales trying to improve our understanding of how carbon is transformed, stored within, and lost from terrestrial environments. This work has kept us busy both in the lab on campus and sent us as far away as the Southern Hemisphere.
Kyle Smart and Suravi Paul have both been conducting laboratory experiments in an effort to understand how we can use soil gas signals to understand critical belowground processes. For Kyle, this has meant feeding soil microbes different types of food ranging from simple sugars to fatty acids and measuring how that affects microbial growth and respiration. He recently published the first chapter of his dissertation in the journal Biogeosciences! Suravi has been focused on the role of roots in soils, which has led her to growing tubs full of grass in the lab and simulating different rainfall patterns.