Mentors and Potential Projects

Effect of a changing climate on nutrient limitation and growth of algae in Arctic aquatic ecosystems and sea ice.

This project will enhance work as part of the Beaufort Lagoon Ecosystems LTER and may include fieldwork in northern Alaska and lab-based incubations of algae under different experimental treatments. Potential to work with university partners from Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences.

Biogeochemical impacts of changing arctic plant communities.

Mentee projects will examine the consequences of changing plant communities in tundra. Mentees will conduct fieldwork at one of Dr. McLaren’s Alaska Fieldwork sites – either near Toolik Field Station or near Unalakleet. Mentees will collect plant data and soil from manipulative or observational experiments under the direction of McLaren and her research group. Soils will be taken back to the McLaren lab at UTEP where mentees will learn biogeochemical analyses

Plant phylogenomics and population genomics in the desert southwest

This project will utilize the latest genomic techniques to look at some iconic and potentially rare taxa with disjunct distributions across the desert southwest. The arid regions of the southwest are not uniform in distribution of plant diversity. There is a high diversity of taxa, especially dependent on elevation, geographic aspect, and geology.  This often leads to species distributions that are highly disjunct resulting in some species having some small populations with isolated distributions. My lab is examining the implications of this regarding gene flow and speciation potential among shrubs, cacti, and annual plants. The potential projects for this ROADS RaMP research scholar will involve taxonomic selection, field collections, and using genomic methods to investigate population genomic and/or phylogenomic questions related to these plants with taxonomic and conservation consequences.

Population structure of Mexican ducks and Mallards of Southwestern USA.

Mentees on this project will take part in a new field site in southern Arizona where Lavretsky and team are beginning to shed light into habitat use, population structure, and hybridization among locally breeding mallards and endemic Mexican ducks. Students will have the opportunity to get hands-on experience in capture methods, handling, banding, and attaching telemetry units on live waterfowl in the field, as well as the latest genomic techniques as part of the Lavretsky Lab at UTEP. Mentees will have the chance to analyze habitat, movement, and molecular data to increase our understanding of breeding populations in Southwestern USA, especially of the relatively unknown Mexican duck that was recently elevated to full species.

Remote sensing of shrub roots to understand desert plant-water relationships

The goal of this project is to study how the spatial distribution of shrubs and their roots belowground are influenced by water, one of the most scarce resources for plants to survive in deserts. The post-bac will learn how to use remote sensing to measure shrub cover and structure, as well as remote sensing techniques to measure root location in the northern Chihuahuan Desert at Jornada Experimental Range.

Function of soil microbes and biocrusts in drylands

Students will help to establish laboratory and field experiments testing the functions of soil bacteria, soil fungi, and surface soil communities known as biological soil crusts (biocrusts) in dryland ecosystems. Experiments will include removal of these functional groups followed by measurements of ecosystem processes such as decomposition, trace gas production, plant productivity, and water balance. Field sites may include local parks, local research sites such as the Jornada Experimental Range, and UTEP's Indio Mountains Research Station. There will also be opportunities to connect with global research communities in areas such as critical zone science and biocrusts, especially via the upcoming launch of a new distributed experimental network called CrustNet.

Carbon dynamics in dryland ecosystems

Our projects seek to understand carbon dynamics in dryland ecosystems with a particular focus on long-term variation. Are these systems sources or sinks of carbon? How do they respond to climate extremes? Mentees will gain numerous data skills while working with long-term datasets of ecosystem carbon and water exchange, or metrics of plant physiology. Depending on interests of the mentee, projects could include fieldwork to collect additional plant and soil physiology data, or computational and modeling approaches.

Multi-scale drives of mammal community composition along natural and anthropogenic habitat gradients.

Project Description: This project attempts to disentangle the relative importance of biotic and abiotic drivers in determining the structure of mammal species communities along natural (e.g., elevation, hydrological) and anthropogenic (e.g., land use, urbanization) landscape gradients. Mentees will have the opportunity to monitor mammal communities using taxa-specific methods (e.g., camera traps for ungulates and meso-carnivores, live-traps and camera boxes for small mammals), collect relevant landscape data, and will learn appropriate statistical methods to analyze landscape composition and evaluate drivers of species distribution and relative abundance.

Microbiomes and carbon storage in dryland systems

Our research uses novel microbiome analyses, combined with an arid-focused soil health assessment framework, and innovative greenhouse experiments to quantify the genomic and functional variability of the soil microbiome across dryland ecosystems and advance the basic understanding of microbial controls on carbon pools in drylands under global change pressures. Mentees will learn molecular techniques to analyze microbiomes and will have the opportunity to set up their own greenhouse experiment or field collection scheme.

Effect of a changing climate on biogeochemistry and primary production of ponds, rivers and coastal lagoons in the Arctic.

As part of the Beaufort Lagoon Ecosystems LTER, participants will participate in fieldwork near Utqiagvik, Alaska. Depending on their interests, participants will be able to use a variety of sensors to monitor greenhouse gas fluxes and ecosystem metabolism, collect samples for analysis of water chemistry (nutrients and trace elements), use remote sensing to track nearshore environments or perform incubations of algae and microbes under different experimental treatments.