919 words for CALSweb 1 November 2009 V1
Space is not the Final Frontier
By Cheryl Dorschner
She called it the final biotic frontier, explained her mission and described
life forms alien to most of the audience sitting before her on Oct. 14, 2009 in
Stafford Hall on the University of Vermont campus. Prominent scientists
concur that she is exploring strange new worlds, boldly and with enterprise.
This is not Star Trek. This is Deborah Neher, chair of plant and soil science
in UVM’s College of Agriculture and Life Sciences, animatedly describing her
latest research findings on soil microinvertebrates.
Science not science fiction – with samples, slurries and microscopes not
starships – Neher explores a thin universe between air and bedrock in order
to identify life forms and understand ecosystems. She does “boldly go where
no man has gone before.”
“This is the last frontier – we know more about outer space and the deep
sea than we know about the organisms in our own back yard,” Neher insists.
“Soil animals make up 23 percent of the total diversity of life, yet we know
only about 10 percent of the taxa and little about their life history. Not only are
their many gaps in the taxonomy, only a handful of scientists study what is
known.”
It’s not enough to merely discover and name these ubiquitous albeit
barely visible creatures that inhabit the thin skin of soil on earth: nematodes,
mites and springtails that live by the thousands to millions per square foot of
soil. Over the past 20 years, Neher has just begun to tease out their role in the
ecosystem, and her findings turned out to be stellar.
One of her research group’s early discoveries is “that physical
disturbances, such as cultivation, have a more detrimental effect on soil food
webs than chemical disturbances, such as fertilization or pesticides,” she
explained.
“I think there’s a lot these soil communities could do for us, but we either
have no idea what they could do or we chop them up with the tiller,” Neher
observes.
So Neher backed up to move forward. She narrowed her focus to the more
consistently undisturbed ecosystem of the woodlands, where she and her
team of researchers and students identify which creatures live in the soil and
how they function. Positioned smack dab in the middle of the food web,
microinvertebrates are “a keystone link” between the predators and
herbivores above ground and the bacteria and microbes below ground, she
says. By measuring how well they predict the quantity of nitrates and
ammonium in soil and whether they produce digestive enzymes for lignin
(rigid / stiff part of wood) or cellulose (from plant cell walls Neher and
colleagues found that nematodes are an indicator of soil health in the forest
floor. They integrate biological, physical and chemical properties to tell us if
the soils are providing the ecosystem services that we expect including
nutrient cycling and decomposition. Her work provided the scientific
justification and statistical rigor that clinched the selection of nematodes as
the biological indicator of choice for monitoring the nation’s farmlands, a
chapter in the H. John Heinz II Center’s State of the Nation’s Ecosystem project
(http://www.heinzctr.org/ecosystems/)
“Deb Neher’s central contribution, which has changed the face of soil
biology, has been new insights into the composition and function of nematode
communities in soil as well as the ecosystem processes they mediate,” said
Professor David Barrington interim chair of plant biology at UVM. Already
Neher’s cutting-edge, world-class initiatives cross the fields of soil biology,
physics and chemistry.
Not only is Neher identifying a genre of creatures that are mostly
unstudied, she is an advocate for a fairly new branch of study – agroecology.
It’s the study of agriculture in context with the world, a fusion of agronomy and
ecology. Neher organized the effort that led to agroecology’s recognition by
the Ecological Society of America. Until “Deb’s pioneering research, most of
the work had been done ‘above ground,’ and there was a great need to
expand … ‘below ground,’” her UVM colleague Ernesto Mendez pointed out.
When Neher summarized her recent research before the UVM community
on Oct. 14, her audience not only better understood her research, but saw first
hand what another of her colleagues said: no matter whether she’s speaking
to undergraduates or her peers, Deborah Neher “clearly truly enjoys students
and teaching and has helped innumerable people further their careers.”
These are the words of Stephen Gleissman, director of the University of
California, Santa Cruz program in community and agroecology and editor of
the Journal of Sustainable Agriculture.
Neher also served on a scientific review panel for the EPA’s 2007 Report
on the Environment and has been funded continuously for the past 15 years
through federal programs such as the US EPA, Dept of Energy, USDA, and
National Science Foundation and the USDA, among others, have continuously
funded her research. Throughout her career, Neher has been principle
investigator on 28 grants totaling $7.6 million to UVM, has been an invited
speaker at 23national and international symposiums so far and has published
47 peer-reviewed articles in 28 scientific journals, 19 chapters in books, and
co-edited a book in just over 20 years.
These qualifications earned Deborah Neher the Hubert W. Vogelmann
Award, the College’s highest faculty award for excellence in research and
scholarship, which Dean Tom Vogelmann presented to her after her lecture
that day.
Neher’s research will continue to clarify the changes in these
microinvertebrate communities as conditions in soil quality with the aim of
developing models that improve our ability to more realistically quantify the
contribution of soil animals to nutrient recycling and ultimately ways to create soil
tests that reflect this valuable information. “Now a lot of training must happen
before anyone can even study these guys (microinvertebrates),” she points
out. “I really want to create tools so even farmers and Extension agents can
test their soils for nematode bioindicators to estimate the ecosystem services
that soil is naturally providing. And her teaching and mentoring will bring
new scientists into this young field; researchers who can build on this
pioneering work and become: agroecology, the next generation.
CAPTION: Deborah Neher, recipient of the UVM College of Agriculture and
Life Sciences 2009 Hubert W. Vogelmann Award for Excellence in Research
and Scholarship. Cheryl Dorschner photo.