“I began at Michigan Tech in 2021 as an MS student in Forest Ecology and Management. I entered with an interest in belowground interactions between plants and microbes, and this morphed into investigating trade-offs that shape how trees forage for resources underground. These trade-offs in root morphological and chemical traits directly relate to how effectively they can find and uptake water and nutrients in different (and possibly changing) environments, as well as carbon release from roots to the atmosphere. These relationships between the carbon and nutrient budgets of trees, their productivity, and carbon released from forest ecosystems allowed us to ask bigger picture questions about how climate warming might affect forest productivity and carbon feedbacks to the atmosphere.
This research project quickly became ~quite large~ and expanded into a PhD to allow me to incorporate potential root acclimation responses to temperature when planted in different environments, a question also critical for adaptive assisted population migration. Finally, I came full circle to my original interest by being able to investigate how the surrounding root fungal communities may interact with root foraging strategies through synergistic or complementary mechanisms.
I am incredibly grateful for my time here at Michigan Tech, especially in our supportive and close-knit department (College of Forest Resources and Environmental Science, CFRES), and am excited to pursue these last questions during my final semester. I am very thankful to the Graduate Dean Awards Advisory Panel for giving me the ability to focus on my research and completing my dissertation this Fall. I would also like to thank my advisors, Dr. Molly Cavaleri and Dr. Andrew Burton, for their support and encouragement along the way; I would not be here completing a PhD without their positive influence. Lastly, I would like to thank my committee members, Dr. Carsten Külheim and Dr. Tristy Vick-Majors for much guidance, as well as my labmates and fellow graduate students in CFRES for their support.”