This has been a really excellent past week! I got my latest incubation trial running on Saturday, and have collected the data for the first three sampling points. This means that I’ve been working 12-15 hour days since the end of last week, but it’s fine – my Woods Hole instincts have kicked back in.

The exciting thing is that all my work
(and delays) to make sure I was prepared and everything was designed properly seem to have been worth something, as my standard curves are coming out with R2 values of 0.999, and (best of all) there are significant differences in CO2 emission rates between most of my treatments. I can’t wait to see the isotopic data to conclusively say what sort of priming dynamics are happening.

The other super exciting news is that my proposal to Cornell’s Toward Sustainability Foundation was funded. This means that I will have the funds to do some soil microbial community sequencing on my upcoming field trial. That is something I wasn’t sure that I would have the chance to do during my Ph.D., so I am delighted that I will have the chance to strengthen those skills over the next year (and hopefully answer some really interesting questions while I’m at it).

This article was posted in Uncategorized and tagged Incubation, Isotopes, Priming, TSF, Woods Hole.