What a difference a year makes! Nearly 200 mm of late summer rain at Fowlers Gap and our DRAGNet plots are unrecognisable. "Just add rain" as Garry says. Tusind tak to Liv Portmann and Peyton Hampel for their help - the biomass harvesting is off the charts! @loveyouleafyou.bsky.social
Little Christmas surprise: check out our new paper out in @newphyt.bsky.social, we investigated nutrient release dynamics in wood. Takeaways: what is known from leaf litter does not apply to wood! Time to consider wood and their decomposers different to those of leaf litter. doi.org/10.1111/nph....
Deadwood represents globally important carbon (C), nitrogen (N), and phosphorus (P) pools. Current wood nutrient dynamics models are extensions of those developed for leaf litter decomposition. Howe.....
Had a great week before our at the Fowlers Gap Arid Zone Research Station doing the annual sampling of our (me and @loveyouleafyou.bsky.social) DRAGNet experimental site. Pretty crispy this year with some pretty fast cover estimates... A lot of bare ground...
Joe Atkinson
Finished up the annual sampling and a spray treatment for @joe-atkinson.bsky.social and I @bugnet.bsky.social sites out at Fowlers Gap. Blue skies and red earth always a great backdrop for fieldwork
Huge effort from the @bugnet.bsky.social team. Been great to be part of this network and fantastic to see this published
Third paper from my phd is out. This was such a nice collaboration, each of us bringing different skills. Some neat images and a relatively simple method to upscale biocrust surveys in dry conditions doi.org/10.1016/j.ge...
Our first paper from the Bug-Network (BugNet) is out! đ
BugNet is a global network studying how invertebrate herbivores and fungal pathogens shape plant diversity & ecosystem functioning worldwide. The paper reports on the methods of the experimental part:
đ onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1002/...
The Bug-Network (BugNet) is a novel global collaborative research network that implements standardized consumer-reduction experiments in herbaceous- or shrub-dominated ecosystems to assess the impact...
New paper in Journal of Sustainable Agriculture and Environment - Soil Bacterial Biodiversity in Drylands Is Dependent on Groundcover Under Increased Temperature
by @mirimunro.bsky.social et al
onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....
Introduction Drylands are a major terrestrial biome, supporting much of the earth's population. Soil microbial communities maintain drylandsâ ecosystem functions but are threatened by increasing tem...
