CANCELLED-Biodiversity Research Seminar: Jennifer Bhatnagar

This in-person event is cancelled. If you would like to attend via zoom, please email tanja.voegel@ubc.ca

Fungi and climate change

Dr. Jennifer Bhatnagar (she/her/hers), Associate Professor, Dept of Biology, Boston University.

Fungi are a megadiverse group of organisms that drive carbon (C) and nutrient cycling through ecosystems through their activity as decomposers, symbionts, and pathogens. Over the last decade, advances in molecular technologies have enabled exploration of the ecological, evolutionary, and biochemical mechanisms that fungi use to control these large-scale processes in situ and how they are modified by global change. This talk will describe key aspects of fungal communities that predict their activity in soils and the unexpected processes by which they do it. I will also describe what we know about climate change impacts on fungal activity in nature and new research on how climate change shifts interactions between fungi and resources that feedback to control the exchange of energy and nutrients between the biosphere and the atmosphere.