Eleven years ago, George Neil Furey first set foot at Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve as a UMN College of Biological Sciences (CBS) graduate student, drawn by the potential of Cedar Creek’s focus on long-term research to enrich his efforts to understand the relationship between soil fertility and plant biodiversity. After earning his Ph.D. (and, in the process, creating an exemplary 3-minute dissertation video), he continued his affiliation with Cedar Creek as a postdoctoral associate, further investigating how plant species richness influences nutrient and carbon storage beneath the surface.
Now, as an associate professor at the Norwegian University of Life Sciences (NMBU) in Ås, Norway, he is rekindling the connection through a mini grant he and colleagues from CBS and NMBU received from a longstanding collaboration between the University of Minnesota and Norwegian universities.
Among the most recent of dozens of grants made possible over the years by the Norwegian Centennial Chair program (NOCC), the $25,000 award brings the strengths of both institutions to bear on Furey’s work. The samples from Cedar Creek — some of which were collected when Furey was just a kid — carry a treasure trove of historical context. NMBU, for its part, has a world-class soil sample archive along with specialized tools for analyzing soil samples. The collaboration-catalyzing mini grant will make it possible for Cedar Creek to send soil samples to NMBU for analyses that will shine light on the mechanisms by which enriching biodiversity is able to boost soil health. It will also support collaborations between the two institutions, leveraging Cedar Creek’s long-term experiments and archived soil samples to understand the effects of plant biodiversity on soil health.
“From the experiment at Cedar Creek, we had reasonable experimental evidence that higher levels of plant biodiversity increased soil carbon and made the soil more fertile,” Furey says. “We're trying to build on that to get a little bit more understanding of why biodiversity might be related to healthy soils. It’s a direct connection to what I did during my Ph.D., and then also with a spin-off to sort of larger ideas.”
CBS collaborators on the grant are Distinguished McKnight University Professor Eric Seabloom and Regents Professor Elizabeth Borer. Furey hopes that the funding will lay the ground for additional funding for further research. Ideally, that would include ongoing collaboration at the intersection of UMN’s strengths in long-term ecosystem research and NMBU’s soil science expertise.
“The Cedar Creek Ecosystem Science Reserve is one of the best in the world for long-term experiments,” Furey says. “Now that I’m based in Norway, I have 30 years to try to send our students to Minnesota to learn from the expertise there, and then to also offer an opportunity for people from Minnesota to come here. I learned a lot about long-term experiments from Cedar Creek, and I’d like to keep that tradition alive.”
The international nature of the program adds a rich dimension to the research, Furey says, by bringing different viewpoints and approaches to doing science together.
“The American culture of science is very principal-investigator driven. In Norway, things are a little bit more collaborative,” he says. “It’s been really valuable for my colleagues to have me bring this sort of U.S. perspective, and then also for us to bring the Norwegian style of culture and science back to Minnesota. It's about the cultural exchange, meeting new people, being a part of different ways of looking at the world and thinking about science.” –Mary Hoff