Lab News Archive
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October 22nd, 2013: Ford gives a talk in E3B at Columbia University.
September 17th, 2013: Doug Hart joins the lab as a technician.
August 21st, 2013: Jason Heckler joins the lab as a technician.
August 20th, 2013: Picarro G-2131i isotopic CO2 analyzer arrives.
August 16th, 2013: Chao's manuscript from his M.S. is accepted by Biogeochemistry.
The paper describes the effets of elevated CO2 and varying N and P availability on C flux through planktonic communities.
August 12th, 2013: Liz Guinessey joins the lab as a Ph.D. student.
Liz is participating in the Integrative Conservation program (ICON) that brings together students and faculty from Ecology, Forestry, Anthropology and Geography.
June 7th, 2013: The lab Mascot is born
Elise brought "Ballenmyer" (best name so far, courtesy of Chao) to life and brought it to its new home.
May 22nd, 2013: Chao gives a talk at the annual SFS meeting.
His talk, "Modeling Carbon Dynamics in a Hypothetical Uniform Stream," used data from Coweeta to simulate annual carbon flux and transport across reaches.
March 15th-April 23rd, 2013: Coweeta SCALER successfully completed.
April 16th, 2013: Elise receives an Odum School small grant.
She will use the award to help fund her dissertation research studying aquatic biogeochemistry and eco-evo dynamics.
January 28th-February 5th, 2013: Chao and Ford travel to Puerto Rico to help set up the initial SCALER experiment.
We managed to find some pastries along the way and Chao discovered his alter ego, Peter Venkman.
September 27th, 2012: Lab renovation is complete!
September 9th-11th, 2012: Chao and Ford attend the "LTER All Scientists" meeting in Estes Park, CO.
August 10th, 2012: Lab has moved to the Odum School at UGA.
July 8th-21st, 2012: Kyungjin attends the Summer Soil Institute at CSU.
July 18th, 2012: Chao and Kyungjin receive awards.
Chao won the Michael S. Gaines Award for excellence in teaching undergraduate biology labs. Kyungjin won the Ida Hyde scholoarship to pursue study outside KU.
July 10th, 2012: Jarad presents at ASLO meeting in Osaka, Japan.
His talk focuses on the influence of nutrients on plankton community structure and ecosystem resilience.
July 9th, 2012: Chao and Ford help install SCALER consumer exclosures in Kings Creek at Konza Prairie.
May 20th-24th, 2012: Ford attends annual Society of Freshwater Science meeting; he breaks a finger and gives a talk.
May 1st, 2012: The lab will be moving to the University of Georgia.
Ford accepts a position at The Odum School of Ecology. The lab will move this August, but will remain connected to KU.
February 29th-March 3rd, 2012: Ford, Andres Lira, Jorge Soberon, and Donald Worster travel to the Santa Rita Experimental Range.
The trip was associated with a seed grant to study the spatial distribution of Mesquites.
February 5th, 2012: Jarad accepts a postdoc with Michel Loreau at CNRS in Moulis, France.
He will continue theoretical work in an effort to understand the controls of biodiversity.
December 12th, 2011: Picarro CO2 isotopic analyzer arrives.
November 3rd, 2011: Jarad's Ecological Monograph is accepted.
His paper, "Experimental test of phytoplankton competition for nutrients and light in poorly-mixed water columns," describes elegant experiments testing predictions for how phytoplankton should be vertically distributed.
October 26th, 2011: Fisherman's breakfast!
To commemorate the end of the field season, we realized Christoph's dream of having a fisherman's breakfast.
October 15th, 2011: Pilgrimage to see Thierry Henry at Sporting KC.
Although he got a red card in the 28th minute, we still had fun.
September 25th, 2011: Lab picnic!
September 20th, 2011: Kyungjin is published in Soil Biology and Biochemistry.
Her paper, "Effects of ammonium and nitrate additions on carbon mineralization in wetland soils," shows how N mediates soil respiration in wetland soils.
August 22nd, 2011: Second muskrat caught on Cross Reservoir.
August 17th, 2011: First muskrat caught on Cross Reservoir
August 9th, 2011: Elise Krueger and Kyungjin Min join the lab as Ph.D. students.
August 5th, 2011: NSF Macrosystems proposal funded.
The SCALER project (Scaling Consumer And Lotic Ecosystem Rates) is a collaborative project involving seven institutions over four years that will use results from small scale experimental manipulations (consumer exclosures on rivers from Puerto Rico to Alaska) to scale ecosystem rates from single reaches to entire watersheds.
June 21st, 2011: Arthur Ankeney joins the lab as a technician.
June 8th, 2011: Tashitso joins the lab as a technician.
June 3rd, 2011: Limnocorrals deployed in Cross Reservoir at the KU Field station.
May 22nd, 2011: Jarad presents at SIAM meeting in Snowbird, Utah.
May 10th, 2011: Ryan Felton joins the lab as a technician.
April 18th, 2011: Chao defended his Master's Thesis, "Carboon Dynamics in Aquatic Ecosystems in Response to Different Nutrient Availability and Rising Atmospheric CO2".
March 10th, 2011: Christopher Lehmeier joins the Ballantyne and Billings labs as a postdoc.
Christoph earned his PhD at the Technische Universität München where he studied plant carbon pool dynamics. He will be studying how warming influences microbially mediated soil organic matter decomposition.
February 28th, 2011: Sarah Glaser accepts position at the College of William and Mary.
In the fall, Sarah will be starting a two year visiting Assistant Professor position in the Biology Department at Wiliam and Mary, with a joint appointment at the Virginia Institute of Marine Sciences.
January 21st, 2011: Jarad Mellard publishes a paper in JTB.
This paper examines the influnce of opposing resource gradients and mixing on the vertical distribution of phytoplankton. doi:10.1016/j.jtbi.2010.09.041
October 17th, 2010: Ford, Patrick, Jorge Soberon, Andres Lira-Noriega and Donald Worster receive a KU Common's Seed Grant.
This project is focused on linking human land-use history to spatial patterns of Mesquites in the Sonoran Desert.
September 10th, 2010: Jarad Mellard joins the lab as a postdoc.
Jarad Mellard arrives from Michigan State University where he worked with Chris Klausmeier and Elena Litchman studying phytoplankton ecology.
August 17th, 2010: Jordan Okie visits the lab.
Jordan Okie from the Brown Lab at UNM spent a week at KU working with Val Smith and Ford on the scaling of metabolism in unicellular organisms.
August 2nd, 2010: Chao and Ford present at ESA in Pittsburgh.
Chao presented a poster titled, "Steady state carbon-nitrogen interaction in fresh water phytoplankton assemblages in response to elevated atmospheric carbon dioxide," and Ford gave a talk, "A theoretical framework for linking extracellular enzymes to rates of SOM decomposition and CO2 production."
May 17th, 2010: Theories in the Field: Spatial point processes and moment equations.
Pictured (L to R): Ford Ballantyne, Mark Holder, John Kelly, Chao Song, Maria Orive, Andres Lira, Sarah Glaser, Patrick Dermyer and Jorge Soberon.
May 6th, 2010: Ryan and Patrick have their Undergraduate Research Assistantship (UGRA) proposals funded.
Ryan will be studying the relative utilization of inorganic and organic forms of Phosphorus by different species of phytoplankton to achieve a deeper understanding of nutreint limitation in aquatic ecosystems. Patrick will be quantifying the expression of transcription factors and enzymes associated with denitrification, and parameterizing a systems-biology model to predict N2O flux from soils.
May 3rd, 2010: Sarah Glaser joins the lab as a postdoc.
Sarah will be incorporating diet stoichiometry into descriptions of niche breadth and modeling the food web dynamics such descriptions entail.
April 29th, 2010: Michelle Mubarak joins the lab as a technician.
March 1st, 2010: Sharon Billings and Ford have received a 3-year NSF grant to study the temperature sensitivity of soil organic matter decomposition.
September 7th-10th, 2009: Ford attends a bayesian statistics workshop in St. Andrews, Scotland.
August 12th, 2009: Chao Song joins the lab as a Master's Student.
June 22nd, 2009: Ryan Behrens joins the lab as a technician.
June 15th, 2009: Patrick Dermyer begins work as a programer.
November 11th, 2008: First KU basketball game.
November 7th, 2008: Trip to the Welda Prairie.
The Kansas Biological Survey and the Nature Conservancy work together to manage and restore native prairie. We recorded data from a weather station on a plot with soil cores. The prairie is used for teaching and basic research.
