Natasja Van Gestel
Texas Tech University, TX·Ecology & Evolution
As the planet warms, will land ecosystems soak up more carbon or release more of it, speeding climate change further? The answer depends on the balance between plants taking in carbon through photosynthesis and plants and soil microbes releasing it through respiration.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Earth & Environmental Science
Microbiology & Immunology
- Topics
climate change
carbon cycle
terrestrial carbon balance
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2027
What they work on
- Measure how experimental warming with open-top chambers changes net ecosystem carbon exchange along an Antarctic gradient from bare glacier soil to full plant cover, using field gas-exchange measurements.
- Identify which soil bacteria, fungi and archaea are actively processing new carbon under warming, using quantitative stable isotope probing (qSIP) with 18O-labeled water and 13C-labeled bicarbonate.
- Assess plant photosynthetic carbon uptake and its warming sensitivity, and attribute carbon flux changes to plant species and microbial taxa using laboratory temperature incubations.
More about the research
Warming effects on carbon lost from soil are the least understood part. This project uses Antarctica as a simplified model ecosystem to untangle these plant and microbial controls.
Why it matters
How much carbon soils and plants release as the world warms is a major uncertainty in climate projections. By measuring how Antarctic plants and active soil microbes change ecosystem carbon balance under warming, this work provides data that could improve earth system climate models used to project the pace of climate change.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Christine Goodale
Cornell University, NY·Ecology & Evolution
Use long-term data from four Hubbard Brook monitoring sites to quantify how tree carbon allocation above and below ground has changed with shifts in soil nitrogen and phosphorus and their uptake by plants.
Kathleen Treseder
University of California-Irvine, CA·Ecology & Evolution
Test whether soil fungi and bacteria adapt to extreme warming more effectively when they interact with the natural microbial community, through field evolution experiments spanning thousands of generations.
Serita Frey
University of New Hampshire, NH·Earth & Environmental Science
Test whether decades of soil warming produce cycles of organic matter decay punctuated by shifts in the soil microbial community, continuing core measurements across Harvard Forest plots warmed 5 degrees Celsius for 13, 16 and 28 years.
The school
Texas Tech University: 9 labs on PI Pages, $257M a year on research, 415 research doctorates a year.
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