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Successful planning, implementation, and breakdown of wetland mesocosm experiment!!! Congrats to Gina for completing her first (of many ;) experiments. Thanks to the lab team and friends of the lab for all the help that went into the success of the project. It takes a village! Now, on to all the lab work to examine the microbes! Summer 2016 - Friends of the Peralta Lab make for awesome field help! Hoop house construction was a success because of the construction skills of Chad, Jonathan, and Gina. Gina's flooding/drying experiment ongoing and plants are thriving. Tomatoes were moved from the lab - these plants aren't thriving as much as the wetland plants :). February 2016 - Thanks to a great group of students and friends, the weekend WRC work day was a success. February in NC is NOT like February in the Midwest! It was a beautiful day to be outside. December 2015 - Bob Christian, Emeritus Professor (and my faculty mentor :) gives us a special tour of his field sites at the Virginia Coast Reserve LTER. It was such a treat to be able to take in all of the different projects Bob and Mark Brinson on understanding sea-level rise impacts on marsh ecology over 25 years at the VCR. December 2015 - After many weeks of rain, we finally snuck a sampling in at North Carolina State University's Center for Environmental Farming Systems (CEFS) down the street in Goldsboro, NC. Yanmei and Casey start up our much anticipated project to examine how long-term agricultural management impacts suppression of soil-borne disease. Fall 2015 - Gina hit the ground running before classes officially started. She took on the annual field sampling at the long-term fertilization and mowing plots at ECU's West Research Campus. Great lab crew - Gina, Jonathan, Spencer, and Morgan - finished soil sampling in no time! Summer 2015 - Field site scoping and legit sampling at the Outer Banks, NC with the M McCoy lab, ECU. In collaboration with the M McCoy Lab (led by MS Student Jo Werba), we examined the impacts of zooplankton dispersal on aquatic community structure and function along a salinity gradient. Spencer led the charge on sampling and processing bacterioplankton! The experiment was set up at the Coastal Studies Institute. Summer 2015 - Sampling baseline conditions at the Greenville Town Creek culvert (pre-construction of green infrastructure to improve stormwater management). We are investigating how the biotic and engineered components of urban stormwater processing interact in order to enhance nitrogen removal capacity. Just a few months later, heavy rains caused the conditions in the lower right. Good thing plans are in the works for the restoration! (Collaborators: Eban Bean, Mike O'Driscoll, Charlie Humphrey, East Carolina University) Summer 2014 - Marcelo shows off the awesome Timberlake wetland restoration site in Tyrell Co., NC. June 2014 - First sampling at the long-term fertilization and mowing plots! Josh, Sheridan, and Casey started off the first of the routine annual soil sampling! Josh's MS thesis examined microbial community composition in response to 12-years of fertilization and disturbance by mowing on these soils. |
| Peralta Lab - Microbial Ecology | peralta lab news |
