Gaurav Kandlikar
Louisiana State University, LA·Ecology & Evolution
Longleaf pine forests once covered much of the North American Coastal Plain. Today they are a threatened global biodiversity hotspot, and land managers often burn them on purpose, using prescribed fire, to restore and conserve them.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Microbiology & Immunology
Education Research
- Topics
longleaf pine
prescribed fire
prescribed burning
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Aug 2031
What they work on
- Evaluate how long-term, frequent prescribed fire shapes the structure and function of soil microbial communities in longleaf pine ecosystems.
- Run a multi-site experiment to measure short-term changes in vegetation, soil microbial communities and litter decomposition rates after prescribed fire.
- Characterize stakeholder perspectives on fire-soil relationships, and study students' understanding of fire through a new course-based undergraduate research experience.
More about the research
Little is known, however, about how these frequent fires affect the soil microbes that support key ecosystem processes such as plant growth and the decomposition of leaf litter. This project creates FIRE-NET, a multi-institutional network of ecologists, land managers, conservationists and education researchers. The network will study how fire and soil affect each other in longleaf pine ecosystems.
Why it matters
Prescribed burning is increasingly used to manage fire-prone ecosystems worldwide. Knowing how frequent fire changes soil microbes and the processes they drive could help land managers and conservationists restore threatened longleaf pine forests. The project's course and educational resources will also train students in fire ecology.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Georgia Seyfried
Oregon State University, OR·Ecology & Evolution
Characterize interactions among regenerating vegetation, soil fertility and microbial communities after single high-severity fires and short-interval reburns in wet western Cascade conifer forests, using field surveys.
Karolina Heyduk
University of Connecticut, CT·Plant Science & Agriculture·Early-career
Develop a gene-expression-based screening tool to discover and catalog C3+CAM vascular plants, which use both normal and drought-adapted CAM photosynthesis.
William Morris
Duke University, NC·Ecology & Evolution
Build and validate a climate- and fire-driven integral projection model for Venus flytraps, using demographic data from near-factorial manipulations of fire frequency, drought, and warming across longleaf pine savannas.
The school
Louisiana State University: 15 labs on PI Pages, $431M a year on research, 323 research doctorates a year.
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