In the winter (2021-2022), an intense fire broke out near the Marshall Mesa area of Boulder and spread downwind toward the cities of Superior and Louisville. It was the most destructive fire in Colorado history, damaging entire neighborhoods. The fire had spread quickly through the grassy plains of Boulder County, pushed by wind over 100 mph. I heard of the fire while spending time with family in New York state. We watched news reels of the flames and evacuation orders. It was the first fire I had "experienced" close to an urban center, and I wondered how it could be different from the more typical wildland fires of the West.
Dr. Noah Fierer and Dr. Eve Hinckley were kind enough to bring me on their project to quantify soil contamination by heavy metals within a few months after the Marshall fire, but before reconstruction at damaged sites. So, during the months of April and May, Cliff Adamchak and I lead the sampling campaign in both burned and unburned neighborhoods. And then the 250 samples were sent to a lab at CSU for processing. More details to come, but you can follow progress on this project here. The published manuscript for this project can be found here.
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During the pandemic, I took a course on metagenomics with Dr. Noah Fierer and Dr. Hannah Holland-Mortiz where we obtained a time-series metagenomic dataset from CU Boulder Engineering professor Cresten Mansfeldt that was sampled from the sewage system of the CU Boulder campus. As a class we divided into groups to assess spatial trends, temporal trends, viral communities, and antibiotic resistance genes from the metagenomic data and the environmental variables that were collected with each sample. I was part of the spatial trends group, and I learned a lot about how to wrangle community data in R, use statistics appropriately for community datasets, and to make visualizations in R.
The manuscript is accessible at https://journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/msystems.00651-22 During an IQ Biology backpacking trip, I talked with several students in the geology department about their ongoing projects, and we dreamed up collaborations that I thought would never come to fruition. But, don't dream up big science ideas around go-getters unless you want something to happen. Geology PhD student, Tristan Caro, quickly brought me onto his soil microbial turnover project to do some marker gene sequencing work in the background of his main project. My role was to elucidate the microbial community composition so that Tristan could associate the lipids he measured to the groups of organisms in the soil that could be producing them. We had talked on the hike about how challenging it is to draw conclusions from lipid-based studies without that community composition data because for some reason or other you always want to know who is there.
In return, Tristan added biocrusts to the turnover project to allow me to see how adding water to the communities impacts their growth rate - with some of the fastest turnover rates measured for the biocrust cyanobacteria as compared to multiple other soil types. This was expected. We usually see rapid green-up and growth of the cyanobacteria community upon rewetting, but it was really cool to see the rate of that growth as compared to other community members and to see how dry-down affected the lipid composition of the soil as well. I look forward to working with Tristan in the future. Here is the preprint of our work Here is the published version of this work. At some point during COVID, I stumbled into the Microbes and Social Equity group, spearheaded by Dr. Sue Ishaq. Over the past few years, I have attended their Speaker Series and Symposia, and I co-authored a paper with them! It was truly a weird experience being half way through my PhD, without any published works, and jumping onto an on-going collaboration at the last minute to make sure that their paper, Twenty Important Research Questions in Microbial Exposure and Social Equity, did not leave out land degradation and differential exposure to infectious disease due to climate change and habitat destruction. I felt very lucky to work with Edauri Navarro-Perez on this writing and learned so much from the experience.
I am very much looking forward to this fall semester. I am taking one class on Teaching and Learning in STEM courses, teaching three sections of Biology & Society Lab, and am serving as co-organizer of the food for weekly EBIO Colloquia. My primary goals for the semester are to publish my work on biocrust natural recovery, draft a manuscript on cultivated biocrust for restoration, and to apply for research grants which will cover my summer salary (my final summer of my PhD). At this point, I am not looking to add more research projects. I am looking to give each project the time it deserves, but to also finish them and prepare for my next steps.
As I watch my classmates give their public talks and defend their dissertations, get married and/or pregnant, and then apply for and move on to new jobs, I realize how fleeting my time here at CU really is. All the people I have met and connected with, all the memories I have in various buildings and with specific instruments will be reduced to words on a page, published for a few people to read. I am not sure where I am headed next, or where inspiration will strike. My friend Meghann quit her job and travelled across America for the last 6 months. She has seen tide pools and lightning-sparked wildfires, laughed at amphibians hitching a ride on a dog and has felt the tumultuous joys of living out of one's car. I wonder if she feels intense purpose/drive now. I wonder if when we meet again it will feel as if nothing has changed, neither of us knowing exactly where we are headed but intensely grateful for the opportunities that have come our way and the people we've encountered as we ramble. I greatly appreciate funding from the IQ Biology Program to attend the Ecological Society of America (ESA) Conference this August in Montréal Canada. See my blog post on their website to read about my experience.
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AuthorSierra is a graduate student in the Barger Lab at CU Boulder studying microbial ecology for dryland restoration. Archives
August 2023
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