Eighteen student and faculty researchers from Odum School of Ecology and other colleges and schools will represent the University of Georgia at the 2025 Ecological Society of America conference to be held in Baltimore from Aug. 10-15.

The 9,000-member Ecological Society of America (ESA) is a nonpartisan organization of scientists founded in 1915 to promote ecological science, raise awareness of the importance of ecology, increase resources available for ecology research and communicate with policymakers.

Odum representatives include:

Henry Davie, an M.S. student, will present “Investigating copper tolerance and osmoregulatory balance in the southern toad (Anaxyrus terrestris) – Can constructed treatment wetlands become ecological traps?”

Anecia Gentles, a Ph.D. student in the Interdisciplinary Doctoral Education in the Arts and Sciences (IDEAS) program, will present a poster titled “Characterizing the microbiome of building-dwelling bat colonies in the Madagascar Highlands.”

Brendan Haile, a Ph.D. student, will present “Subsidy or scarcity: Variation in food availability drives dynamics of intermittently shed pathogens” in a session on disease and epidemiology. The authors developed a mathematical model for how food availability impacts how hosts shed pathogens and argue that it’s important to monitor food resources for wildlife that host zoonotic pathogens.

Emma Kelsick, an M.S. student, will present “Effects of compounded disturbances of fertilizer and flood on nitrogen cycling microbial communities.” In a greenhouse experiment using soil microcosms from agricultural fields in southeastern Pennsylvania, Kelsick studied how tillage intensity, fertilizer and flooding—alone or in combination—affect nitrogen cycling microbial community composition in organic farming.

Jacob Lott, an M.S. student, will present a poster titled “Long-term trends of macroinvertebrate bioassessment indices in potentially impaired sandhill streams in South Carolina.” Since the mid-1990s, long-term monitoring of macroinvertebrates has been used at the U.S. Department of Energy Savannah River Site to examine stream ecosystem recovery and to direct remedial action. While some sites have improved, the recovery at others has stagnated. Researchers sought to reassess recovery trajectories using standard qualitative and quantitative approaches.

Rohit Nandakumar, a Ph.D. student, contributed a poster—“Catching fire: Integrating fire into global frameworks of tree-mycorrhizal associations”—which looks at whether fire regimes promote arbuscular mycorrhizal trees (trees that traditionally dominate in hotter areas) even in colder regions.

Ph.D. student Supraja Rajagopal will present a poster titled “Sublethal costs of infection reduce performance of collective tasks in social insects: A modelling study.”

Shishir Rao, a Ph.D. student, will present “Hydropower dam alters estuarine salinity and suspended sediment transport with implications for estuarine bivalve-dependent livelihoods in Karnataka, India.” Comparing dammed and undammed rivers, researchers found that monsoons have an impact on salinity in estuaries, but in dammed rivers, the flood pulse is dampened by reservoirs. Data from the interviews suggest that bivalve availability has drastically declined in the dam-affected estuary, and bivalve collections no longer constitute a dependable source of livelihood.

M.S. student Andrea Rivera will have a poster—“The implications of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi colonization for soil nitrogen in different farming systems”—which looks at the effects of fertilization and tillage on AMF colonization and on nitrogen-cycling soil microorganisms.

Basil Senso, an M.S. student, will have a poster titled “Environmental drivers of parasitic nematode dynamics in wild ungulates in the Serengeti National Park.”

Assistant Professor Megan Vahsen will present “Environment alone cannot predict a global invader’s success: The role of genotype-by-environment interactions and density dependence in shaping plant fitness.” This study exposed 95 genotypes of cheatgrass to different soil microclimates and plant densities across four common garden sites with different elevation and climate, over two growing seasons. Researchers recorded survival and seed production for each plant, characterized the temperature and moisture experienced by the plants and calculated a “climate difference” index, representing the deviation between the local weather and the 30-year climate norm of each plant’s genotypic origin.

In other colleges:

From the College of Agricultural and Environmental Sciences, Ph.D. student Xiomy Davila will present “Disentangling the effects of drought severity, drought length and plant age on biofuel sorghum root mycobiome assembly,” which looks at how the length and severity of drought, as well as plant age, affects a plant’s biomass and the fungi it nurtures around its roots.

Anny Chung, the Haines Family Associate Professor of Plant Ecology in the Plant Biology Department of the Franklin College of Arts and Sciences, organized a session on the Dynamic Dryland Soil Microbiomes in the Anthropocene. Her talk is titled “Disentangling the effects of drought severity, drought length and plant age on biofuel sorghum root mycobiome assembly.”

Lekeah Durden, a postdoc in Marine Sciences within Franklin College, will present “Morning glory fungal endosymbiont reduces belowground enemy damage to neighboring species,” which explores whether corn grown in soil inoculated with Southern root-knot nematodes would benefit from growing with a morning glory variety known to produce fewer nematode galls.

Herbert Leavitt, a Ph.D. student in Marine Sciences within Franklin College, will present “Resilient food webs in changing landscapes: Measuring food web response to mangrove encroachment,” exploring how species are adapting to changing resources. The black mangrove is rapidly replacing smooth cordgrass in salt marshes, increasing by 500% on the Louisiana coast, but the species pool living in the area has remained the same, showing adaptation.

Angelia Romano, a Ph.D. student in Plant Biology in Franklin College, will present “Shifting priorities: Frequent fire alters microbial nutrient acquisition in forest soils,” which looks at eight long-term prescribed fire experiments in oak and pine forests to understand how microbes acquire nutrients after regular burning. Romano is part of the Wurzburger Lab at Odum.

Kanchana Balasubramanian, a Ph.D. student in the Integrative Conservation (ICON) program in Warnell School of Forestry and Natural Resources will present “Prioritization of areas for forest-based ecosystem services, with a focus on water, biodiversity, and carbon in the Upper Oconee watershed in Georgia, United States.” The study identified hotspots of land cover change, evaluated the impacts of urbanization on water, biodiversity, and carbon sequestration, and prioritized sub-basins for conservation by evaluating tradeoffs and synergies.

Shinyeong Park, also a Ph.D. student in the ICON program at Warnell, has a poster on a sustainable agriculture practice in Korea that prioritizes multispecies co-existence in rice farming. “Crane-inspired farming: Developing a transformative system for convivial conservation” describes an approach to allow cranes to forage within agricultural landscapes, advocating a shift from efficiency-driven farming to practices aligned with natural rhythms.