After working closely with Etienne this year as a part of UM’s Undergraduate Research Opportunity Program (UROP), Makayla presented a poster on her research at last week’s UROP symposium. Nice work, Makayla!
On March 11, Alison presented and successfully defended her dissertation, entitled “A Social-Ecological Analysis of Ecological Nutrient Management using Cover Crops in the U.S. Midwest.” Congratulations, Alison, on this major achievement!!
Etienne was recently awarded a USDA NIFA Predoctoral Fellowship to support her dissertation research and career development. Her research project, titled “Understanding Variation in Cover Crop Performance Across Spatial Scales,” uses participatory approaches to reduce uncertainty surrounding cover crop growth across different environmental and management conditions on working farms in the Great Lakes region. Congratulations, Etienne!
Congratulations to Alison and Etienne! Alison’s paper in Society & Natural Resources reports findings from a case study showing how the National Wildlife Foundation’s Cover Crop Champions program leverages strategic communication methods and farmer networks to increase cover crop adoption.
Bressler, A., Plumhoff, M., Hoey, L., and J. Blesh. 2021. Cover Crop Champions: Linking strategic communication approaches with farmer networks to support cover crop adoption. Society and Natural Resources. DOI: 10.1080/08941920.2021.1980165
Etienne’s paper in Ecosphere, based on a literature review and a field experiment conducted at the UM Campus Farm, highlights the role of intraspecific trait variation in explaining ecosystem services from cover crops.
Herrick, E. and J. Blesh. 2021. The importance of intraspecific trait variation in cover crops. Ecosphere. https://doi.org/10.1002/ecs2.3817
Anne Elise Stratton defended her PhD in July, 2021, and Marta Plumhoff and Ali Surdoval defended their Master’s theses in April and August, 2021, respectively. We wish them well in the next stages of their careers!
Etienne is a 2021 recipient of the Rackham Public Scholarship Grant– a program that supports graduate student projects that are co-created and mutually beneficial for students and community partners. This funding enables Etienne to work collaboratively with farmers across the Great Lakes Region. Read more about the Rackham Program in Public Scholarship along with details on Etienne’s citizen science data collection project here.
Kent and Jennifer’s proposal to the Graham Institute Carbon Neutrality Acceleration Program was funded! The experiment will test the capacity for legume-grass cover crop mixtures to simultaneously supply nutrients to crops and sequester carbon in soil. The project will use soil from working farms in Michigan that have a range of different properties, which will help our research account for the real-world variability in soils that farmers consider when making management decisions.
Congratulations, Anne Elise! Anne Elise’s new paper in Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems presents an indicator framework linking ecological and nutritional functions of agroecosystems. The paper applies the framework and indicator set to a case study of Q’eqchi’ Maya smallholders in eastern Guatemala, using farm management and crop quality data from 60 households to determine the status of agroecosystem functions and assess coping and adaptive capacities in response to shocks.
Stratton, A.E., L. Kuhl, and J. Blesh. 2020. Ecological and nutritional functions of agroecosystems as indicators of smallholder resilience. Frontiers in Sustainable Food Systems. 4:543914. doi: 10.3389/fsufs.2020.543914
A new forum paper in BioScience discusses critical research needs to better link changes in soil health on farms to watershed-scale reductions in nitrogen and phosphorus losses that cause water pollution. The paper emerged from a workshop on improving models of nutrient loading and harmful algal blooms coordinated by the Michigan Environmental Council and by the Cooperative Institute for Great Lakes Research (CIGLR).
Zimnicki, T., Boring, T., Evenson, G., Kalcic, M., Karlen, D., Zhang, Y. and J. Blesh. 2020. On quantifying water quality benefits of healthy soils. BioScience. https://doi.org/10.1093/biosci/biaa011
Two new articles from our cover crop research on vegetable farms in southeastern Michigan focus on understanding variation in root functional traits, and ecological controls on legume nitrogen fixation, across a soil organic matter gradient:
Bukovsky-Reyes, S., Isaac, M., and J. Blesh. 2019. Effects of intercropping and soil properties on root functional traits of cover crops. Agriculture, Ecosystems, and Environment. https://doi.org/10.1016/j.agee.2019.106614
Blesh, J. 2019. Feedbacks between nitrogen fixation and soil organic matter increase ecosystem functions in diversified agroecosystems. Ecological Applications. https://doi.org/10.1002/eap.1986
Congratulations to Anne Elise and Jennifer, Co-PIs on a new grant funded by the Conservation, Food, and Health Foundation, and led by a Brazilian NGO collaborator, CEPAGRO (Center for the Study and Promotion of Community Agriculture). The project, “Next Generation Cover Crops: Driving Innovation in Soil Management with Participatory Certification,” will support on-farm cover crop research and capacity-building with farmers transitioning to agroecological production in southern Brazil.
Soil and Agroecosystems Lab 