Matthew Bowker
Northern Arizona University, AZ·Ecology & Evolution
In many dry and cold parts of the world, the soil surface is covered by a thin living skin made of tiny plants and microbes, called a biological soil crust, or biocrust. Biocrusts have existed on Earth for something like two billion years, and they do real work: making soil fertile, holding or redirecting water, holding soil in place against erosion, and adding to the variety of life in a place.
- Fields
Ecology & Evolution
Earth & Environmental Science
Plant Science & Agriculture
- Topics
biological soil crust
biocrust
drylands
- Grants
- 1 known grant, through Dec 2028
What they work on
- Determine what controls the functional biodiversity of biological soil crusts at a global scale, through standardized surveys of biocrust composition run at many international sites.
- Test what sets the strength and shape of the relationship between biocrust biodiversity and ecosystem function, by measuring functions along gradients of biocrust development across ecosystems.
- Test whether biocrust functional diversity makes ecosystems more resistant and resilient to physical disturbance, using low-cost experimental soil surface disturbance and tracking of biocrust recovery.
- Assess biocrust responses to climate change using reciprocal transplantation between climates and rainfall reduction with passive shelters, and pool results into a global biocrust trait and function database.
More about the research
What controls how diverse a biocrust is, and whether that diversity makes the surrounding ecosystem more able to withstand or bounce back from stress, is largely unknown at a global scale.
Why it matters
Biocrusts keep dryland soils fertile, manage water and prevent erosion, so losing them affects people who live in and depend on these ecosystems. A global, standardized dataset could yield better predictions of how climate and land use change will alter biocrusts and the functions they provide, informing land management in drylands. The work also tests whether diversity in these communities buffers ecosystems against disturbance.
Known grants
From NIH and NSF research grants. Labs often have other funding we can't see.
Closest labs
Michael Strickland
University of Idaho, ID·Ecology & Evolution
Determine how deep soil communities and processes interact with surface soils to shape whole ecosystems, using 24 instrumented Deep Soil Ecotron chambers holding soil profiles up to three meters deep.
Jiaqi Tan
Louisiana State University, LA·Ecology & Evolution
Test how elevated temperatures change microbe-microbe interactions and their effects on host fitness, using synthetic bacterial communities on duckweed, a small aquatic plant, in automated high-throughput experiments.
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.
The school
Northern Arizona University: 4 labs on PI Pages, $94M a year on research, 86 research doctorates a year.
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