Karina Engelbrecht Clemmensen seminar

Karina Engelbrecht Clemmensen (https://www.slu.se/en/cv/karina-engelbrecht-clemmensen/), Professor at the Forest Mycology and Plant Pathology Department, Swedish University of Agricultural Sciences (SLU) in Uppsala, will be with us on Monday 9th and Tuesday 10th April 2018. Her research focuses on carbon sequestration in soils, more specifically she is interested in the role of fungi in this process in the boreal forest and arctic tundra; and the importance of interactions between the different guilds of mushrooms (saprophyte, mycorrhizal, pathogenic, etc.) for the regulation of nutrient fluxes.

"In a global perspective, northern arctic and boreal biomes act as major belowground carbon sinks. However, large variation in carbon stocks exists among northern ecosystems, and a working hypothesis is that this variation is driven by the relative dominance of the three major fungal guilds – the saprotrophic, ectomycorrhizal and ericoid mycorrhizal fungi. In this seminar, I will present data from manipulative field studies in boreal forest and arctic tundra in which we transplanted organic substrates vertically across soil profiles and horizontally between ecosystem types in order to test relative importance of different fungal groups as drivers of decomposition. I will also present data from recent studies linking phylogenetic and functional shifts in fungal communities to ecosystem properties along forest productivity, fertility and carbon storage gradients."