Plant ecology at Emory & Henry University

8-3-2026: Early results from 2 years of growth in the S. nigra SW Virginia common garden were a hit at Botany 2026 in Tucson, AZ! Dalton Fore and Natalie Morrison, both 2026 grads of E&H and coauthors on this presentation, did great work collecting and analyzing data on herbivory and phenology of this ecologically important species.

7-23-2026: Two years ago these trees were little cuttings about 1 foot tall. Now many of them are taller than me, producing flowers, and harboring a diverse arthropod community!

4-23-2025: Less than one year in and the specialist herbivores have found our black willow trees! This is a viceroy butterfly caterpillar (Limenitis archippus), trying its best to look like a bird poop so it doesn't get eaten.

5-23-2024: Salix nigra cuttings are almost all potted and growing nicely in the greenhouse! Only two dead out of the 60 we collected last winter. These are destined for the Bartlett-Crowe Field Station wetland mid-June!

5-21-2024: One of our biggest projects this summer is establishing a Salix nigra common garden/clone bank using the 60 cuttings that we collected from 6 populations in December and January. The Bartlett-Crowe Field Station has a wetland habitat, which is perfect for S. nigra! We finished our initial clearing of the plot today, which was mostly invasive multiflora rose. More updates on this project coming throughout the summer!

4-14-2024: It's morel season! And also some other fungi: collected puffballs for eating and another just for identification, which I think is hexagonal-pored polypore (Neofavolus alveolaris).

2-27-2024: It's a busy time in the E&H greenhouse! In addition to our normal living collection, we also have garden plants started by our advanced organic food production class for the E&H garden, and two student Salix nigra research projects. One student is studying floral phenology and morphology differences between populations from a latitudinal gradient (see below), and the other is studying how mycorrhizal type influences tissue nutrient concentration and insect herbivore development. 

12-28-2023: This winter, I am collecting black willow (Salix nigra) cuttings from five populations across a latitudinal gradient (Pennsylvania to South Carolina). The goal of this study will be to determine if there are population-level differences in phenology, floral morphology, and growth of the species, which is important for supporting early-season pollinators in riparian and wetland habitats. I returned to the WVU Core Arboretum this December to sample from a great S. nigra population along the Monongahela River in Morgantown (pictured at right).

10-12-2023: This week, our BIOL 345 (Ecology) class is assessing the effect of native prairie restoration on the abundance and biodiversity of ground-dwelling arthropods. This study used the native habitat restoration site at the Holston Conference Emory Cemetery adjacent to our campus in Emory, VA. This habitat restoration was completed in 2023 in conjunction with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Partners program.

9-11-2023: Our ENVS 100 (Intro to environmental studies) class got some hands on experience with small-scale agriculture today at the Emory & Henry Garden! It's great to get the non-laboratory class outside when we can.

4-17-2023: I was a recent guest on the "Limed: Teaching with a Twist" podcast, which discusses challenges with pedagogy in higher education. This was a fun and very useful experience for me! Check it out here or wherever you get your podcasts!

4-3-2023: This week in field ecology lab (BIOL 350), students placed pitfall traps to collect data on arthropod (i.e. invertebrate) diversity in different locations across the Emory & Henry campus. These are a great way to study the effects of different land-use types on arthropods at the soil surface, and one of my students will conduct a similar study in community gardens this summer!

9-28-2022: ENVS students in the organic gardening class at Emory & Henry helped to start our E&H Garden sale! We sold over 160 lb each of butternut squash and sweet potatoes to faculty and staff, all grown at the E&H organic garden on campus!

7-5-2022: Sandy is working on organizing our insect collection, and here is the box of beetles (Order Coleoptera) and true bugs (Order Hemiptera). Thirty-one families represented here!

6-24-2022: To help understand Rhododendron invasion in Europe, Sandy and I collected leaf tissue from two species of Rhododendron native to the Appalachian Mountains to send to Dr. Giullaume Decocq's lab at Université de Picardie Jules Verne in France! They hope to determine if the invasive species in Europe hybridized with R. catawbiense (native to the southeastern US) or R. maximum (native across much of the eastern US) at some point in the past. It was fun traveling to a few locations in southern WV to find these two Rhododendron species!

3-29-2022: Today, I accepted an offer to become the newest member of the Departments of Biology and Environmental Studies as assistant professor at Emory & Henry College in southwest Virginia! It has been my goal ever since my time at St. Lawrence University to become a professor at a small liberal arts college, and I am very excited to start this new part of my career this coming fall!

2-27-2022: I am now hosting a live WV bird feeder stream on YouTube, using a raspberry pi 4B and camera. Check it out here!

1-7-2022: Check out our recent publication in Global Change Biology - Bioenergy where we explored nitrification dynamics in the rhizosphere of energy sorghum! Nitrification is a process performed by soil microbes that produces nitrate, which can then leach out of the soil and degrade the quality of groundwater. Sorghum has some interesting effects on those microbes in the rhizosphere (narrow region of soil directly surrounding roots), which we studied in 2018 and 2019 at the University of Illinois Energy Farm. The open access article can be found here!

9-8-2021: Here's a good article from NPR on reducing the use of jargon in climate change messaging. It is necessary to consider the target audience for climate pieces and speak or write accordingly, and of course peer-reviewed articles will contain more jargon because they are directed towards other scientists. Doing plain-language press releases for scientific articles and including plain-language abstracts (which some journals require and others encourage) is a step in the right direction that most of us could take. This is the study that the NPR article reported on.

8-20-2021: For one chapter of my dissertation I leveraged long-term datasets at the Fernow Experimental Forest in Tucker County, WV to see if there were linkages between watershed tree species composition and stream water nitrate export. Generally speaking, stream nitrate export appears to be mostly controlled by trends in nitrogen deposition, which began to diminish in the early-1990s after ammendment to the Clean Air Act. This study was just published as part of the special issue of the journal Forests on Responses of Forest Ecosystems to Nitrogen Deposition!

7-31-2021: In the late spring of 2020, we experienced heavy rainfall and transient flooding in central IL shortly after planting corn and bioenergy sorghum crops. We took advantage of the situation by comparing establishment corn and sorghum and performance of throughout the season after this early-season stress, finding that sorghum was much more resilient than corn! These results are now published in Agronomy Journal.

3-8-2021: Check out this new paper by Brooke Eastman of the Peterjohn Lab at WVU that shows how long-term N additions affect carbon partitioning in a temperate forest!

12-22-2020: Check out this new paper on energy, carbon, and nitrogen fluxes from bioenergy sorghum, miscanthus, and maize at the UIUC Energy Farm! This open access article can be found here.

11-5-2020: That's a wrap on the 2020 growing season at the Energy Farm! Now it's time to hit the lab and finish processing all of our work from this summer. Looking forward to learning more about how sorghum influences nitrous oxide emissions from these fields!

10-13-2020: Harvest day for corn at the Energy Farm.

9-1-2020: Increasing the inclusion and achievement of underrepresented groups in STEM fields is a vital role for higher education. This is a particularly prominent issue in 2020, when we have a global pandemic harming our educational system and society as a whole, a resulting public health crisis that disproportionately affects black communities, and racial tensions that are exacerbated by our nation's leadership. How can we best serve a diverse student body and maximize achievement by all racial and cultural groups in STEM fields?

We take seriously our commitment to active learning in the classroom. Recent research shows that active learning in STEM classes narrows the achievement gap for underrepresented students, and also increases the success of all students. Need help figuring out how to incorporate active learning into online classes? See below!

8-15-2020: Although my current position doesn't include teaching responsibilities, I am closely following the rapid, COVID-induced transition to remote teaching and learning. Online instruction is a big part of the future of education, like it or not, so learning how to be an effective teacher in a remote format is essential.

Active learning is (or should be) an integral part of every classroom, but how do we do that online or in a socially-distanced classroom? Louisiana State University has put together a fantastic guide for modifying well-known face-to-face activities and assessment techniques to fit a distance-learning environment. Check it out!

7-1-2020: One of our main questions this summer: Why do sorghum fields lose proportionally more nitogen as nitrous oxide compared to corn fields? Despite being fertilized about half as much as corn, sorghum has equal annual flux of nitrous oxide from the soil. This summer, we're collecting bulk and rhizosphere soil from sorghum and corn as well as cores to 50 cm depth to investigate a few mechanisms for this phenomenon. Here is Ingrid flash-freezing soil in liquid nitrogen to measure microbial gene expression for the process of denitrification, which is one of the major pathways for nitrous oxide production in soils. 

6-17-2020: During the summer of 2018, we learned that sorghum loses around twice as much fertilizer N as nitrous oxide compared to corn. This summer, we're taking a deep dive into figuring out why, in part by frequently monitoring soil moisture dynamics to a depth of 1 meter in sorghum and corn fields.

5-22-2020: Sorghum is coming up at the UIUC Energy Farm!

4-22-2020: Entering the third field season of CABBI means that sorghum will be back at the Energy Farm after soybean rotation year in 2019. This field season marks the first full 3-year rotation, since we manage the fields as sorghum-sorghum-soy (or corn-corn-soy). So after this season, I'll build and publish our compete nitrogen budget for bioenergy sorghum in an effort to assess its environmental sustainability compared to corn! Towards this end, we swapped out another set of resin lysimeters this week to estimate nitrate leaching into ground water. 

4-20-2020: Planning on measuring soil C or N stocks? Do it right and express your numbers by equivalent soil mass rather than at fixed depths! This paper from Adam Von Haden will show you why and teach you how.

6-23-19: Check out this cool assassin bug nymph! Family Reduviidae. Probably a Wheel Bug nymph (Arilus cristatus). Assassin bugs are pretty common around town, if you look for them. They're ambush predators that often hang out on herbaceous plant stems frequented by pollinators. The one in the picture is around an inch long, leg tip to antenna tip.

6-21-19: Summer is officially here, and we have installed soil water collectors to measure nitrate concentration in leachate from the transgenic sorghum plots. 

6-18-19: Happy with how my little yard garden... yarden?... is growing. 

6-4-19: After the delays caused by this year's wet spring (like the rest of the Midwest), we finally planted our sorghum plots today! We planted a two-way randomized complete-block design that includes transgenic sorghum, non-modified sorghum, and maize across two fertilization levels. The transgenic sorghum does not produce sorgoleone, a secondary metabolite that inhibits nitrate production in the soil. We're comparing this to regular sorghum and maize to quantify how much sorgoleon production by sorghum reduces nitrate leaching into ground water.

5-23-2019: More lysimeters! We're using these to more intensively measure how biological nitrification inhibition in the sorghum rhizosphere affects nitrate loss from agricultural fields. We'll plant these plots soon!

4-25-2019: How much nitrate leaches from bioenergy crops? We use resin lysimeters to find out. We just finished replacing them in corn and sorghum plots, and installed a new set in a Miscanthus agronomy trial, at the University of Illinois Energy Farm.

4-12-2019: Field season is getting started. We were out measuring trace gas flux from our maize and sorghum plots today.