Political responses to the COVID-19 pandemic led to changes in city soundscapes around the globe. From March to October 2020, a consortium of 261 contributors from 35 countries brought together by the Silent Cities project built a unique soundscape recordings collection to report on local acoustic changes in urban areas. …
Editorial for a special issue on Biocrusts in Frontiers in Microbiology can be found here. The special issue consists of 25 articles which can be downloaded as an e-book here. The remit for submissions is reproduced below: Biological soil crusts (biocrusts) are widely distributed throughout the world, and cover approximately …
Shrub encroachment is occurring in many of the world’s drylands, but its impacts on ecosystem structure and function are still poorly understood. In particular, it remains unclear how shrub encroachment affects dryland soil surfaces, including biological soil crust (biocrust) communities. In this study, soil surfaces (0–1 cm depth) were sampled from …
MMU Engage interviewed me for British Science Week to find out about the research being done at MMU by various researchers. In the video I explain how we extracted DNA from the sand of the Kalahari in Botswana, which we then used to identify the microbial communities that glue the …
How do restoration projects affect soil microbial communities? What are the functional implications for the soil? How can we use microbial community data to improve land management?