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.

SEAS Press Release

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

The Blesh Lab took a break from fieldwork a couple of weeks ago to celebrate the marriage of Alison & Jake. Congratulations from all of us!