A key sustainability measure for bioenergy crops is their ability to store carbon belowground. Soil organic carbon (SOC) is a dynamic reservoir, with long-term storage influenced by belowground inputs and the interaction of this carbon with soil minerals and aggregates. Research to date has improved our understanding of belowground carbon pools, such as live above and belowground biomass in perennial and annual crops and certain fluxes like autotrophic and heterotrophic root respiration. To complete the understanding of soil carbon, we are examining the timing and magnitude of root production to estimate root turnover in three energy crops. In this study, we are using minirhizotrons and root ingrowth cores to measure root production, phenology, and depth distribution, enabling root biomass turnover times to be calculated. The data analysis and manuscripts are being prepared as of now.
Past Projects
Dr. Adam von Haden led this project and collected data from 2018 to 2020. His website provides a brief description of the project. I joined the latter part of the project mainly to assist with R coding. It was a steep learning curve for me, and with Dr. von Haden's guidance and support, we finished the data analysis.
This project aimed to evaluate Nitrogen loss reduction provided by DWM and saturated buffers to assess their potential inclusion as recommended practices in the Illinois Nutrient Loss Reduction Strategy (NLRS). Dr. Laura Christianson (My Awesome advisor) secured $499,992 over four years from the Illinois Nutrient Research & Education Council (NREC). We found that nitrate removal was consistent with the values from Iowa and recommended that it be included in Illinois NLRS. This work is published in the Journal of Environmental Quality. The controlled drainage study results can be found in my dissertation and here.
In this project, we attempted to assess the potential of saturated buffers as an edge-of-field practice throughout the Midwest of the US. This modeling approach was conducted using ArcGIS software. We used publicly available geospatial datasets (NHD+, CDL, etc) for this analysis. This work is published in Agricultural & Environmental Letters.
In this project, I assessed changes in the physical properties of a restored prairie after 20 years of establishment. I measured in-situ soil hydraulic conductivity using an amoozemeter and took soil cores up to 60 cm deep to conduct laboratory measurements. The work was performed in Alfisols with a claypan and was intense fieldwork. Can you imagine manually taking soil cores where a claypan layer is present? I could complete this work thanks to Dr. Samuel Haruna and Dr. Ashan Rajper, who were my lab mates at the time. Overall, this was a great experience. This work is published in Geoderma.
This was my undergraduate research project, my first-ever experience with an applied research project. In this project, we tried to evaluate the performances of nitrogen-enriched biochar as a slow-releasing nitrogen fertilizer input for tomatoes under greenhouse conditions.