Conservation students learned plant identification skills and helped establish long-term vegetation monitoring plots on the University of South Alabama campus along with Katie and Madison from Mobile Bay National Estuarine Program!

We've been working hard to isolate arbuscular mycorrhizal spores and dark septate endophyte strains from multiple sites around the Alabama Gulf Coast. Our goal is to isolate and identify strains that confer pathogen protection and enhance growth of coastal plant species in hopes to improve the restoration of coastal plant communities.

We are excited to welcome new graduate student William Sterrett and directed studies undergraduate students Ayana Cunningham and Jada Gildersleeve to the Henning lab!  Check out the people page to see who we are and what we will be working on this spring!

New paper out that explores biotic and abiotic drivers of respiration in bog ecosystems.  

We are excited to announce that we will be establishing a nutrient addition x disturbance experiment off the west end of Dauphin Island.  This experiment will be part of the DRAGNet (Disturbance and Resources Across Global Grasslands) global network (NutNet).  Stay tuned as we drop in experimental plots and start rototilling the beach!

New paper exploring our ability to predict plant phenotype in response to inoculation with different microbiome bacteria and how subtle changes in microbiome composition alter plant resources allocation and acquisition. Add in a little bit of mass-ratio hypothesis, qPCR, and simple predictive models and we figured out that we're not very good at predicting plant morphological responses to microbiome composition. Read more here.

Jeremiah is down today giving a seminar at the Dauphin Island Sea Lab in the Marine Sciences seminar series, meeting all of our neighbors at the sea lab and seeing all the facilities the sea lab has to offer!

Madison, Sydney, and Logan have joined the group, check out their bios in our People tab!!

J was in Gainesville this week presenting a seminar in the Water, Wetlands, and Watersheds group and meeting lots of great coastal ecologists at the Howard Odum Center for Wetlands. It was fun being able to present some new ideas and directions as our group starts our foray in to coastal dune ecology!!