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Life Sciences

West Virginia University

Theses/Dissertations

2022

Biogeochemistry

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Cross-Kingdom Interactions Shape Soil Biogeochemistry In Natural And Agricultural Ecosystems, Jennifer Lynne Kane Jan 2022

Cross-Kingdom Interactions Shape Soil Biogeochemistry In Natural And Agricultural Ecosystems, Jennifer Lynne Kane

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

Microorganisms influence life on earth in innumerable ways, including in medical, industrial, environmental, and agricultural contexts. Given the increasingly apparent consequences of climate warming, interest in how to better predict and manage Earth’s carbon sinks has never been greater. Soil, the largest terrestrial carbon sink, harbors an incredibly taxonomically and functionally diverse microbial community. These soil-dwelling microbes govern the fate of soil carbon and nutrients by cycling organic matter as they live, grow, and die. It has only been relatively recently that technological advancement has allowed for in-depth surveys of the vast diversity of soil microbes. High throughput analytical capabilities …


Frayed Connections: How Long-Term Nitrogen Additions Disrupt Plant-Soil Interactions And The Carbon Cycle Of A Temperate Forest, Brooke A. Eastman Jan 2022

Frayed Connections: How Long-Term Nitrogen Additions Disrupt Plant-Soil Interactions And The Carbon Cycle Of A Temperate Forest, Brooke A. Eastman

Graduate Theses, Dissertations, and Problem Reports

Forests are expected to mitigate some of the negative effects of climate change by sequestering anthropogenic carbon (C) from the atmosphere, but the degree to which they drawn down C will depend on the availability of key nutrients, such as nitrogen (N). There is a fair amount of uncertainty in the future of the forest C sink, mostly owing to the fate of soil organic matter (SOM) and soil heterotrophic respiration to future conditions. In N limited systems, plants allocate a significant amount of their photosynthate belowground for the acquisition of nutrients, but under conditions of chronic N deposition, plants …