Seriously @globalchangebio.bsky.social & @wiley.com ?! 😡🧪🌍

Are you at @ESA2025 today? Come see my poster (263) about small consumer impacts on plant litter impacts on decomposition!

#TWINWIN experiment is an agricultural biodiversity experiment, where the agricultural crop is undersown with cover crop species mixtures of varying species richness and functional composition to test if results from ecological biodiversity experiments can be applied to agricultural practices. 2/6

🚨📃🧪 New paper out: "Impacts of diverse undersown cover crops on seasonal soil microbial properties". Rashmi Shrestha used the #TWINWIN experiment to show that undersowing crops with diverse plant mixtures, particularly including legumes has beneficial effects on soil microbial life and function 1/6

Despite having a smaller impact than plant species diversity, our findings show that a loss of arthropod or fungal consumers could destabilize plant communities. The small critter has important ecological roles, such contributing to ecological stability! Don't overlook it 🪲🍄🐛💚

Plant species richness increased biomass stability due to an increase in plant species asynchrony. Food web complexity alone did not impact community stability, but it further increased species asynchrony at high plant species richness.

Based on 14 years of plant biomass data from an experiment in which we manipulated plant species richness and presence of different consumer groups (insect herbivores, foliar fungal pathogens, soil oomycetes), we studied the joint impact of plant diversity and trophic complexity for stability.

After a lot of office work, I finally got to the field again: disease survey at beautiful #cedarcreek 😃

What a beautiful plenary by Rodolfo Dirzo at #esa2024 about how great mentorship has led to insights into how interactions between hosts and their consumers are changing in the anthropocene

This is the first manuscript from the #TWINWIN experiment, an agricultural diversity experiment, in which we grew barley with different undersown plant communities to study the role of undersowing for various agroecosystem functions above- and belowground .

"The potential of undersown species identity vs. diversity to manage disease in crops" 📄soon to be published in @funecology.bsky.social Good news: single species can be used to suppress early season disease of barley, if these species are at sufficient abundance!

We had our first bison meat from North Star bison today. Some of North Stars bisons help maintaining the Cedar Creek prairies right next to the experiment where I am studying the role of trophic interactions. I guess I am now an apex predator in my study ecosystem.