Hannah B. Shulman ₊˚ʚ 🌀 ₊˚✧ ﾟ.

all i see is maple sap flowing 🤩 🍁

lineman, soldier and photographer (grandma's first husband), history teacher and rancher (grandma's second husband), stats professor (grandma's third husband).

Space-for-time substitution approaches in ecology do work! (at least in temperate grasslands)
www.nature.com/articles/s41...

In our latest paper, just published in @natcomms.nature.com we show that soil conditions, landscape structure & land-use change shape global soil pathogenic fungal diversity. Landscape complexity and crops increase diversity, while grass and tree cover reduce it www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Sub-alpine omens - Poets for Science Three-legged cow— Omen of endurance, of merciful husbandry, of balance learned on the ridges knife-edge, moving through the wound. Wolf at the treeline— Omen of return, of old laws testing new borders...

A poem I wrote while doing fieldwork at high-elevation ecosystems (@rmblscience.bsky.social) is now published online by Poets for Science!

poetsforscience.org/sub-alpine-o...

Nutrient limitation shapes functional traits of mycorrhizal fungi and phosphorus-cycling bacteria across an elevation gradient | mSystems Phosphorus (P) limits plant productivity in high-elevation ecosystems, yet the microbial networks that mobilize P, including arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi and phosphorus-cycling bacteria (PCBs), remain under-characterized in these nutrient-poor soils. We show that across a 10,00-m elevation gradient, AM fungi and P-cycling gene assemblages shift predictably with pH, organic carbon, and phosphate availability. Higher elevations, with less available P, select for stress-tolerant AM fungal taxa and PCB strategies geared toward mineral solubilization, while low-elevation sites favor root colonization by AM fungi and organic P mineralization. These results suggest that nutrient limitation can constrain microbial community assembly in consistent ways across landscapes. High mountain soils are low in P and rely on a network of underground AM fungi and PCB to deliver nutrients to plants. This study shows how those underground relationships reorganize with elevation and how climate change could collapse long-standing microbial strategies by pushing high-elevation ecosystems toward lowland conditions. As soils warm and dry, the microbial scaffolding that supports alpine plant life may become increasingly unstable.

Nutrient limitation shapes functional traits of mycorrhizal fungi and phosphorus-cycling bacteria across an elevation gradient

#mSystems by @hannahshulman.bsky.social et al

journals.asm.org/doi/10.1128/...

Mycorrizhal Music, by Ess Whiteley 7 track album

I'm so enchanted by this new record, "Mycorrhizal Music" by Ess Whiteley, a composer and grad student at UC San Diego. My favorite track is "Whispered Messages in Tapestried Fields of Fluid Motion."

metronrecords.bandcamp.com/album/mycorr...

Nutrient limitation shapes functional traits of mycorrhizal fungi and phosphorus-cycling bacteria across an elevation gradient | mSystems Phosphorus (P) limits plant productivity in high-elevation ecosystems, yet the microbial networks that mobilize P, including arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungi and phosphorus-cycling bacteria (PCBs), r...

Our new study linking bacterial and AM fungal phosphorus cycling is out now in mSystems! 🦠🏔️

This work was done by a great team based at @rmblscience.bsky.social, including
@skivlin.bsky.social and @aclassen.bsky.social

doi.org/10.1128/msys...

Ily wvu 💙💛 thanks for having meee

I love it too Mike! 🧡

Interesting!! I respect that you statisticians love boxplots, but data structure/assumption checking is not (usually) part of my final ecology/biology story. Usually when i see boxplots, people have no clue what the iqrs or medians represent in the context of the experimental question 🤷🏼‍♀️

They give the wrong impression *if* the mean misrepresents the data due to model assumptions not being met.

sometimes simple is good!!

Boxplots are great when different data distributions matter to your research question, but they’re used a lot (by default) in #rstats when the goal is to show treatment means. If your model focuses on mean responses, a simple mean ± SD (or CI) bar plot is nicer 😗

Tennessee red valencia peanuts grown in my garden in knoxville, with beautiful nodules of rhizobia 🥜🤎

because...you love it??

Are you an ecologist who lives for fieldwork on wild, rugged terrain? If you dread returning to the lab where your personal style is stifled by required PPE, fear not. Introducing the GLEET™, a BSL-1 compliant Glove for your Feet, for seamless transition from field to lab.

tricky question...I'd say exudation is a metabolic process, whereas rhizodeposition is more like an ecosystem-level phenomenon of total OM contributed by the roots to the soil. Eg. super labile exudates will be respired asap by microbes, and rhizodeposits can be "passive" like root necromass.

Labeling chambers are up and running so these dual-mycorrhizal plants are incorporating 13-CO2 to measure how much they give their fungal mutualists

Barbara McClintock portrait

🧬🌽 Happy Transposon Day! 🌽🧬

Today we celebrate the birthday of Barbara McClintock - scientist extraordinaire and discoverer of jumping genes. Still the only woman to have an unshared Nobel Prize in the biomedical sciences #TransposonDay2025

Simple & elegant figure from Nagahashi et al 2010 showing synergistic effects of root exudates on hyphal branching in Gigaspora rosea

link.springer.com/chapter/10.1...

Integrating ‘cry for help’ strategies for sustainable agriculture Plants recruit specific soil microbes through a sophisticated ‘cry for help’ strategy to mitigate environmental stresses. Recent advances highlight the potential of leveraging this mechanism to develop microbe-based approaches for enhancing crop health, but challenges remain in refining the criteria and conceptual frameworks to effectively investigate and harness these plant–microbe interactions.

Integrating ‘cry for help’ strategies for sustainable agriculture #plantscience

Cool new paper about diversity effects on mycorrizal resource exchange out in new phyt!!!

I had a great time and learned a lot at the DOE earth system science meeting this past week. Thank you everyone who came to chat with me about our fungal phenology experiment and to all the great presenters ✨💚🌎

I like to use a silva-based bayesian classifer, works great

A framework for integrating genomics, microbial traits, and ecosystem biogeochemistry - Nature Communications Microbes drive the Earth’s biogeochemical cycles. Here, Li et al. present a framework for integrating genome-inferred microbial kinetic traits into ecosystem mechanistic models, and use it to benchmar...

You know the way we all talk about leveraging 'omics information to improve ecosystem/biogeochemical model performance - well here's a step in that direction - led by Zhen Li integrating across many scientific teams to make this happen www.nature.com/articles/s41...

An ancestral function of strigolactones as symbiotic rhizosphere signals - Nature Communications Strigolactones (SLs) regulate angiosperm development and promote symbiosis with arbuscular mycorrhizae. Here the authors show that bryosymbiol, an SL present in bryophytes and angiosperms, promotes AM...

Cool paper by Kodama et al...a bryophyte makes Strigolactones (SLs) to recruit mycorrhiza, but doesn't use SL as a growth hormone, showing that SLs first evolved in the ancestor of land plants to initiate symbiosis. Love being reminded that symbiosis is everything.

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

want 2 combine datasets produced by different 'omics methods (eg, 16S + ITS) & analyze interkingdom interactions? 🦠🍄

Brunner et al 2024 show that clr-normalizing data separately + accommodating sparsity reduce error, then describe this error "signature" so you can spot it

doi.org/10.1093/isme...

Hey BlueSky! I made a starter pack for folks working on mycorrhizal symbioses. LMK who else to include! go.bsky.app/285P8Tn

Hi! I would love to be added. I study mycorrhizal phenology and controls on N/P cycling!!