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.
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