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EEB Tuesday Lunch Seminar/student evaluation: Complex diversity in soil habitats

Nicholas Medina, EEB Graduate Student
Tuesday, November 13, 2018
12:00-1:00 PM
1010 Biological Sciences Building Map
Abstract
Soils are fundamental to sustainable agriculture, ecosystem development, and biodiversity maintenance. At the same time, they are also widely understood to be complicated and heterogeneous habitats. This structural and functional diversity challenges the persistence of ideas about soil functioning that tend to emphasize precise prediction based on the behavior of isolated component parts of soil, and instead embraces models with more generality. In response, I will discuss ways in which soils can be considered “complex” systems, as well as insights that this perspective provides. I will also show data that explore how other complex systems, namely ant colony behavior, can interact with complex facets of soil organization, specifically soil aggregation processes. Ultimately, this talk will highlight the implications of multi-faceted scaling patterns for understanding soil resilience, drawing from previous examples in ecology and other academic disciplines.
Building: Biological Sciences Building
Event Type: Workshop / Seminar
Tags: Biology, Ecology, Research, Science
Source: Happening @ Michigan from Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, EEB Tuesday Lunch Seminars