Roots to shoots: Exploring eastern gamagrass diversity across the Central U.S.

Описание: In this engaging and accessible presentation, Joel Swift, National Science Foundation Postdoctoral Fellow in the Wagner Lab at the University of Kansas, discusses the lab's development of eastern gamagrass, Tripsacum dactyloides, an emblematic tallgrass prairie native, as a system to understand the impacts of multiple environmental stressors on plant form, function and the microbiome.

T. dactyloides is broadly distributed across the U.S., from the lower Northeast to Texas and Florida. The lab's common garden encompasses more than 100 accessions collected from across the country, representing environments with vastly different conditions—from dry shortgrass prairies to mesic seeps and riparian areas. Lab members are currently leading projects to explore the morphological diversity of T. dactyloides; and conducting experiments with subsets of accessions to assess their ability to tolerate both drought and flooding. This work will shed light on the dynamic interactions and feedback among environmental stressors, root architecture and anatomy, and the root microbiome.

Joel is introduced by Maggie Wagner, an associate scientist at the Kansas Biological Survey & Center for Ecological Research and an associate professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at KU.