Two graduate student assistantships are available starting in the Spring, Summer, or Fall 2022 semester in the Department of Soil & Water Systems at the University of Idaho. These positions are funded through a recently awarded grant from the USDA to examine the interacting effects of multiple soil health management practices. This is an opportunity to be a part of a multi-disciplinary scientific group, working closely with stakeholders to better understand soil health and its implication to biogeochemistry and soil microbial communities.

Students will conduct research in both the field and the lab, examining how cover crop diversity, grazing, intercropping, and soil amendments interact to influence carbon and nitrogen cycling, and soil microbial community composition and function. Students will gain skills in experimental design, statistical analyses, use and analysis of stable isotopes, and next-generation sequencing approaches. Students will be co-advised by Drs. Zachary Kayler and Michael Strickland (www.stricklandlab.com) .

Stipend for these assistantships is $28K per year. Tuition and health care are also covered. If interested in this project, please contact me (zkayler@uidaho.edu) or Dr. Strickland (mstrickland@uidaho.edu) with your CV/resume, brief statement of research interests and experience (500 words), and names/contact information for 3 references.

We analyzed soils from the NEON sites in Puerto Rico for soil quality and health characteristics. It was a great opportunity to compare land-use impacts on soil and a chance to detect Hurricane effects. There are many properties inherent to soils that should be considered when formulating an index.

Dr. Kayler and an international team of scholars published current hypotheses and theory on organic matter dynamics in the journal Frontiers in Earth Science.

A publication stemming from a collaborative project in Siberia. Published in Agricultural and Forest Meteorology, Dr. Félix Brédoire (now a post-doc at the University of Wyoming) led the project that focused on dendrochronolog and soil moisture modeling.