 |
| Visiting Fellows Home | Apply for Fellowship | Visiting Fellows Listing | Contact Us |
Scott Bates
|
Project title: Surveying the diversity and biogeography of fungi in arid-land soils and biological soil crustsMicrobes play essential roles in soil processes including the formation of soil structure, stabilization through the aggregation of soil particles, and, perhaps most importantly, mediating nutrient cycling. In arid-lands, microbially driven organosedimentary topsoil assemblages known as biological soil crusts (BSCs) are a critical component of these nutrient limited and erosion prone soils. While BSCs are ubiquitous on terrestrial surfaces of the Earth’s arid and semi-arid ecosystems, understanding of the diversity of organisms that are present in BSCs and how the community structure of BSC microbes changes across regions or in response to edaphic factors is still limited. This knowledge gap limits our ability to provide useful data to inform predictive and conceptual modeling of crust cover, global nutrient cycling, or ecological processes in arid-lands. Scott T. Bates is a visiting postdoctoral fellow in the lab of Noah Fierer. Previous work in the Fierer lab has focused on understanding factors that influence the structure and diversity of archaeal, fungal, bacterial, and viral communities in the soil environment. In this effort, the Fierer group has pioneered the use of barcoded pyrosequencing, a high-throughput sequencing technique which generates thousands of sequences from hundreds of individual samples, in conjunction with phylogenetically based multivariate statistical methods to gain a comprehensive understanding of the diversity soil microbes and the dynamics that shape these communities. Scott is interested in apply these techniques to the study of microbes in arid-land BSCs, with a special emphasis on fungi, in order to elucidate factors that influence the formation and spatial variability of these unique communities. In addition to this work, Scott is involved in examining interaction between soil archaea and bacteria, microbes involved in leaf litter decay, as well as potential endosymbiotic bacteria of lichens. Office: Office: CIRES 318
|
