CMS Meeting – May 15, 2019
- When: Wednesday, May 15, 2019, from 7:00 pm to 9:00 pm
- Where: Amazon Community Center, 2700 Hilyard St, Eugene, Oregon 97405
This event is free and open to the public. There will be a mushroom identification session. Bring what’s in your basket, edible or not, and learn from the experienced members of our community.
Dr. Krista McGuire, Principal Investigator for the McGuire Microbial Ecology Lab at the University of Oregon will speak about how plants and fungi respond to human disturbance such as agriculture, urbanization, and shifting climate. Human activity is causing major alterations in biodiversity and biogeochemical cycling across the planet, and soil fungi and bacteria often mediate ecosystem responses to these changes. To uncover the underlying ecological mechanisms for these patterns and processes, Dr. McGuire’s team of researchers use an integrative approach that combines ecosystem-level measurements, field experiments, functional assays, and genomics. The team conducts research in tropical ecosystems of Malaysia, Puerto Rico, and Panama; as well as green infrastructure in urban environments; and a local project on microbial diversity in Oregon vineyards.
About the Speaker: Krista McGuire is a microbial ecologist at the Institute of Ecology and Evolution within the Department of Biology at the University of Oregon. She received her Ph.D. from the University of Michigan in 2007 and was a professor at Barnard College and Columbia University for eight years before moving to Oregon in 2017. In her research, she focuses on how plant-soil-fungal feedbacks influence nutrient cycling processes, and how these patterns and processes change across human land use gradients. The projects in her lab span multiple systems including tropical rain forests, urban centers, and vineyards, but are united by addressing fundamental questions in ecology that have implications for management and conservation.
