MRI: Acquisition of Instrumentation to Enhance Faculty-Student Research in Community Ecology and Biogeochemistry

St. Catherine University, Saint Paul MN

Investigators

Abstract

This award is funded under the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009 (Public Law 111-5). This award provides funds to St. Catherine University to acquire a suite of instrumentation for analysis of the nutrient content of soil, plant tissue, and water samples. This will make possible research emphasizing the relationship between nutrient cycling and both plant-soil and community interactions in ecosystems. Dr. Martha Phillips will use the equipment for research focused on invasive species and long-term plant community dynamics in wetland ecosystems. Observed spatial and temporal patterns in invasion by Phalaris arundinacea (an invasive grass in wetlands) suggest that nutrient availability plays a large role in invasion risk. The equipment will be used to assess links between nutrient status and community invasion, as well as nutrients as driving competitive interactions between invasive and native species. Understanding the linkages between nutrient availability and invasive species will allow for better control of invasive species, thereby preserving biodiversity and natural ecosystem functioning, and preventing economic damage. The work of Dr. Jill Welter focuses on the integration of food web structure and nutrient cycling in river networks, providing quantitative linkages between communities of organisms and C, N, and P cycling. The quantification of these nutrient pools will further our understanding of the influence of the availability and resource stoichiometry of potentially limiting nutrients and food web structure on nutrient transformation and release to downstream ecosystems. This work emphasizes biotic interactions that may influence rates of nitrogen fixation, differentially affecting N and P transport. This is especially important in understanding how changes in N and P supply, so often a result of human inputs, influence nutrient uptake and retention and are transmitted downstream. The instrumentation will strongly enhance the intellectual scope of faculty-student research in community and ecosystem science and will be integrated into research-based undergraduate curricula in biology and chemistry. At the baccalaureate level, St. Catherine University is a liberal arts institution for women where many students (~25%) identify as multicultural and 27% are first generation college students; thus the equipment will help us to prepare women and students of color to succeed in graduate school and scientific careers.