Back to Calendar

NRESS Environmental Sciences Seminar Series

Wednesday, October 24, 2018
2:30 PM - 3:30 PM
James Hall, G46
Event Type
(none)
Contact
Lynne Cooper
603-862-2227
Campus
Durham
Event Url
Link
https://calendar.unh.edu/EventDetails.aspx?EventDetailId=48711

NRESS PhD Program Fall 2018 Environmental Sciences Seminar Series presents
"This Microbial Life: New Perceptions of our Microbial World", a mini-series within the seminar series. We welcome the third of four speakers in this mini-series:

Dr. Ed Hall, Assistant Professor, Ecosystem Science and Sustainability, Colorado State University

The Causes and Consequences of Microbial Biomass
The increasing understanding of earth’s microbiome has led to unprecedented clarity of the important ways in which microbial communities influence a range of societally relevant systems (agricultural and cropping systems, human health, the built environment). At the same time the increased information on the unseen majority has peeled back the cover on the exceptional complexity of the earth’s microbiome. In the past two years we have increased the number of known phyla of all life by as much as a third, estimated that there are a trillion microbial species on the planet and the revised the best estimates of total planetary microbial biomass to just under 100 GT (~50 times that of all animal biomass combined). Because living organisms share a common biochemistry, understanding the causes and consequences of the biochemistry of microbial biomass is one way to constrain the complexity of the diversity of nature and provides an avenue to better understand how microrganisms contribute to many fundamental ecosystem processes. In this talk I will discuss work from my lab on stoichiometric trait distributions of bacterial populations and communities, the influence of microbial metabolism on glacial dissolved organic matter, and how changes in the microbiome due to metal stress may alter food webs of a stream ecosystem. The shared biochemistry of life on earth may be one of the great unifying principals to help us understand the complexity of the interaction between the biosphere and the chemosphere of the planet.

 

 

Ed Hall
less
Get Directions
Event Date
Event Time
Title
Location