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About MeI am an EPA STAR fellow and PhD candidate in the department of Ecology, Evolution & Environmental Biology at Columbia University. My research encompasses biogeochemistry, plant ecophysiology and the response of terrestrial ecosystems to global change. Within this I am specifically interested in patterns, trajectories and controls of the nitrogen and carbon cycles. For my dissertation I am examining the mechanisms by which temperature controls patterns of nitrogen fixing tree abundance across latitude. My research uses a combination of experimental approaches (field, greenhouse and growth chamber) and theoretical modelling. In my PhD I am advised by Duncan Menge, but I also work closely with Kevin Griffin. Currently I am visiting the Homyak lab at UC Riverside.
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News
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December 2019:
I had a poster and was a coauthor on Duncan Menge's talk at AGU in San Francisco. Both were in the "Carbon and Nutrient Cycle Interactions in the "Terrestrial Ecosystems: Integrating Theory, Observations, Experiments, and Models" session - thank you to the INCyTE folks for organizing! My poster was on how temperature and species affect the timescales over which nitrogen fixation is regulated, with Kevin Griffin and Duncan Menge as coathors. Duncan's talk was on the structural and metabolic costs of nitrogen fixation, with Amelia Wolf and Kevin Griffin as additional coathors. December 2019:
I'll be spending the next few months in Southern California as a visiting student researcher in Pete Homyak's lab at UC Riverside. Looking forward to the warm weather and interacting with Pete and his fantastic group while I am here! June 2019: I enjoyed visiting Oregon's Coast Range, where I measured photosynthesis and dark respiration on red alder and Douglas fir. These data will tell us something about how leaf (or needle) carbon exchange changes with added nitrogen and phosphorus and how this may be different for nitrogen fixing vs. nonfixing trees. Thank you to Steve Perakis for showing me around the site and for providing support while I was there. |
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May 2019: I gave a CRPPY talk at Princeton on the timescales over which nitrogen fixation is regulated in tropical and temperate woody plants. It was great seeing old friends, meeting new ones, and hearing about the exciting research happening in the EEB departments at Columbia, Rutgers, Princeton, Penn, and Yale. |
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April 2019: New paper out in Methods in Ecology and Evolution that develops a method for making coupled measurements of nitrogenase activity and carbon exchange in nitrogen fixing plants that are continuous, repeatable and in real-time. Bytnerowicz et al. 2019. |
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December 2018: I had a great time at my first AGU meeting in Washington DC! There I gave a talk in the session "From -omics to the Earth System: Bridging Scales to Improve our Understanding of Earth System Function and Response I" with Kevin Griffin and Duncan Menge as coauthors. |
Contact
Thomas Bytnerowicz
Ecology, Evolution & Environmental Biology Columbia University tb2583@columbia.edu |
