Our group asks how plant symbionts and plant/microbial traits regulate the way grasslands take up, store and lose carbon and nutrients — and how this changes under nitrogen deposition, drought and warming.
Mycorrhizal fungi and plant nutrition
How arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi transfer nitrogen and phosphorus to plants, reduce nutrient losses such as P leaching and N₂O emissions, and how the functional diversity of AM fungal communities shapes plant resource allocation and growth.
Genome size as a functional trait
Using plant and fungal genome size to understand community assembly and ecological strategies — from β-diversity of temperate grasslands to fungal life-history strategies along soil fertility gradients and plant–microbe interactions.
Grassland carbon and nutrient cycling
Long-term nitrogen and multi-nutrient addition experiments in the Inner Mongolia steppe: plant stoichiometry, soil organic carbon fractions (POC vs. MAOC), phytolith-occluded carbon, soil aggregates and litter decomposition.
Climate extremes and plant–soil feedbacks
How drought and warming alter plant productivity, root traits, belowground carbon allocation and mycorrhizal partnerships in pasture and grassland systems, drawing on field experiments in Australia and China.
Approaches
Long-term field manipulation experiments, glasshouse experiments, stable isotope tracing (¹³C, ¹⁵N), amplicon sequencing of fungal and bacterial communities, trait-based and meta-analytical approaches, and statistical modelling in R.