- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
André Custodio Franco, assistant professor, Indiana University, Bloomington, will speak on "Deciphering the Soil Macrobiome: Belowground Communities Driving Ecosystem Responses to Global Change" at a seminar hosted Monday, Nov. 18 by the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology.
It's set or 4:10 p.m. in Room 122 of Briggs Hall, UC Davis campus. It also will be on Zoom.
"Growing scientific evidence indicates that soil fauna and the ecosystem functions and services they provide are threatened by global environmental changes such as those related to climate and land use," Franco says in his abstract. "These threats affect species diversity and functional groups in belowground food webs, impacting ecosystem services that all life depends on. A better understanding of global change impacts on interactions among soil fauna communities and plants, as well as on physical and geochemical processes driven by soil fauna will enhance our ability to predict changes at the ecosystem level."
He will discuss "recent evidence indicating that soil fauna responses may challenge aboveground-based predictions of ecosystem functioning under global change."
Franco joined the Paul O'Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs, Indiana University in 2012 after serving as a research scientist at the Department of Biology, Colorado State University, from 2018 to 2022, where he was an International Presidential Fellow. Other honors include Senior Global Futures Fellow, Julie Ann Wrigley Global Futures Laboratory.
Franco focuses his research on how modern global environmental changes are affecting soils from tropical crop fields and rainforests to temperate grasslands, according to a faculty post. "His work has contributed to unraveling fundamental roles of microscopic soil animals, such as nematodes, and larger ones such as earthworms and termites, in influencing ecosystem responses to changing climate and land-use regimes."
His areas of interest include soil ecology, soil-plant interactions, ecosystem functioning, global environmental changes, sustainability and sustainable development.
Franco holds a bachelor's degree in agronomy (2008) from Universidade Estadual de Santa Cruz, Brazil; a master's degree (2012) in bioenergy, Universidade Estadual de Londrina, Brazil; and a doctorate (2015) in soil science from the University of São Paulo, Brazil. His dissertation: "Soil Engineering by Macroinvertebrates: Controls on Soil Organic Matter Storage Across Land Use."
Nematologist Amanda Hodson, assistant professor of soil ecology and pest management, is coordinating the ENT seminars. The full list is here. For more information or for technical issues, contact Hodson at akhodson@ucdavis.edu.
- Author: Kathy Keatley Garvey
So says global change ecologist Amanda Koltz, a senior scientist with the Department of Biology, Washington University, St. Louis, who will speak on "Species Interactions and Ecosystems in a Changing World" at the UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology's virtual seminar Wednesday, Oct. 14.
The Zoom seminar begins at 4:10 and ends at 5. Koltz will field questions from the audience.
"Biological communities and species interactions are changing rapidly as a result of global change," she says in her abstract. "These changes are likely to have cascading effects on ecosystems, but we still have limited understanding of the extent to which organismal responses to global change may also drive ecosystem responses to it. In this talk, I will present some of my work on the potential feedbacks between global change, communities, and ecosystem functioning from two different study systems. First, I will discuss how warming can alter the cascading effects of spiders in the Arctic tundra, and then I will discuss my recent efforts at characterizing the potential consequences of shifting interactions among ruminant hosts and their parasites. The common theme throughout the talk will be the importance of considering species interactions in efforts to understand ecosystem responses to global change."
Koltz describes herself as a "global change ecologist interested in how species interactions influence community composition and ecosystem function in the context of environmental change. I use common, widespread organisms that are sensitive to change-- like wolf spiders, mosquitoes and gut worms--to better understand how the animals in our everyday lives impact the ecosystems we live in. My recent work focuses on two fundamental questions: (1) How do biological communities respond to changes in the environment? and (2) What are the consequences of changes in species interactions for the cycling of energy and nutrients within ecosystems?"
Cooperative Extension specialist and agricultural entomologist Ian Grettenberger, assistant professor, UC Davis Department of Entomology and Nematology, coordinates the fall series of virtual seminars. They are held on Wednesdays at 4:10 p.m.
Host for the Koltz seminar is Emily Meineke, assistant professor of urban landscape entomology, who researches insect-plant interactions. The two met when they were working on their doctorates: Koltz was at Duke University and Meineke at North Carolina State University. Their interests overlap.
Grettenberger announced that this is the form to obtain the zoom link:
https://docs.google.com/forms/
Koltz's research has appeared in a number of recent publications:
- Small but Mighty: Measuring Parasites' Footprints
- Wolf Spiders May Turn to Cannibalism in a Warming Arctic
- Warming Alters Predator-Prey Interactions in the Arctic
- Bugged Out by Climate Change
- Higher Education Channel: Arctic Wolf Spider's Changing Diet May Help Keep Arctic Cool & Lessen Some Impact of Global Warming
