UW Botany research findings published in PNAS

Botany department's research scientist Jane Zelikova and professors Dave Williams and Elise Pendall along with scientists from the US Department of Agriculture (USDA) studied the effect of elevated CO2 and warming on grassland vegetation which will provide insights that Wyoming ranchers and land managers need to make grassland ecosystems more resistant to wide fluctuations in rainfall and temperatures. Under elevated atmospheric CO2 concentrations, they found that "grasslands changed from being dominated by two very common species now (western wheatgrass, an intermediate grass, and blue grama, a short grass) toward other gramonoids and forbs that aren't as dominant now".  These findings, commented Dave Williams, "will help us refine models used to predict how our grasslands will function and function 100 years from now".

Graduate students Amanda Brennan and Jennifer Bell in the field

These findings were published in the Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences (PNAS), a prestigious multi-disciplinary journal on Oct 13, 2014 (DOI: 10.1073/pnas.1414659111)

Link to Dr. Zelikova's web page - click here

Link to Dr. Williams's Lab web page - click here

UW, CSU Research: Microbes Accelerate Soil Carbon Loss

Dr. Elise Pendall and her team of UW and CSU researchers publish their findings in Ecology Letters.

Read more from the UW press release: http://www.uwyo.edu/uw/news/2012/11/uw,-csu-research-microbes-accelerate-soil-carbon-loss.html

Journal's website: http://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/ele.12034/abstract

To learn more about Dr. Pendall's research and her lab, please visit her website at https://sites.google.com/site/pendalllab/

What will Wyoming's grasslands look like in a hundred years?

Warming temperatures and rising carbon dioxide in the air are likely to shift the dominant plant species and alter soil nutrient availability, according to experimental conditions in the Prairie Heating and CO2 Enrichment experiment near Cheyenne. The experiment is being conducted in native grassland by Botany professors Elise Pendall and Dave Williams, in collaboration with Jack Morgan and other researchers at the Agricultural Research Service in Fort Collins, CO.

Results from the first three years suggest that cool season grasses, favored by grazers, may give way to warm season species with lower forage quality. However, warmer temperature increases the availability of nitrogen in soil, a key ingredient of proteins in leaves. This may offset reductions in tissue quality brought about by the higher carbon dioxide in the atmosphere and species shifts. More details can be found in our paper published in Nature.

The balance between carbon dioxide uptake by plants and decomposition in grassland soils will determine how much carbon is ultimately stored in ecosystems. Williams’ group is studying how photosynthesis reacts to the experimental conditions. Pendall is studying these carbon cycling processes using chambers designed for the experiment, shown in the photo with graduate research assistant Nick Brown. Carbon cycling is affected by the futuristic carbon dioxide levels, especially during low-precipitation years, but the grassland ecosystem is more resilient to warmer temperatures.

For more information, contact Dr. Elise Pendall, pendall@uwyo.edu, or visit the Pendall Lab website at https://sites.google.com/site/pendalllab/.