Fire can act as an ecological catalyst in many landscapes—clearing debris, returning nutrients to the soil and triggering seed germination.

But not every form of life wins when scorching heat tears through the landscape.

Isabelle “Bell” Scherick is working to find out how fire impacts the soil microbial community, especially fungi that might be particularly sensitive to fire. 

“The microbial community in the soil is very important for ground cover, regrowth, and determining what plant species become dominant,” Scherick said. “In a fire, a lot of the fungi die out, but they come back at some point, the community reassembles at some point. How is the community reassembling and how are the new fungi dispersed into the burned areas?”

A Ph.D. student at the Odum School of Ecology, Scherick is conducting research at the Jones Center at Ichauway with David Mason, who is an assistant scientist at the Jones Center and an adjunct professor at the Odum School. She also works with Anny Chung, Haines Family Associate Professor of Plant Ecology, and Richard Hall, associate professor of ecology.

Scherick wants to learn more about how the microbial community reassembles after a fire longleaf pine ecosystems of Ichauway and landscapes like it.

Her research is aimed at identifying what moves fungal spores around, particularly after a fire disrupts plant and animal life in an area. Those spores might arrive directly on wind or on leaves falling from adjacent trees. Bugs and animals dwelling above or below ground might bring them in. Fungi deep below the surface might survive a fire and redistribute them.

To find out how microbial life returns, Scherick is placing sanitized soil—dirt that’s been heated in an autoclave—in small, specialized tins in a field that’s been scorched during a controlled burn. Each tin is placed 25 meters from the edge of the fire line, but some of the tins have a fine mesh on the bottom or top to isolate how spores might get into the soil. She’s collecting those tins after 12, 24, 36, 28 and 60 days to see how the microbial community changes. The fungi will be identified by extracting DNA from soil using techniques developed by Chung’s lab.

“This will help me to understand which fungi are being dispersed by bugs, wind or water, and in what time frame after a fire,” Scherick said.

Microbial dispersal—where and how microbes disperse—is a relatively new field of study, and post-fire dispersal may be different in Georgia than in many other places. Fires here may be shorter and less hot because they often are planned controlled burns, rather than out-of-control wildfires.

While people generally understand that fire is a normal event in many ecosystems, and that some plants and animals thrive in the wake of a burn, we don’t know as much about how microbes return, Scherick said.

“There’s been a long historical assumption that dispersal didn’t really matter with microbes. People thought that microbes are everywhere, so they are going to get everywhere,” she said. “We now understand that not every species can reach every place; there are dispersal limitations.

“On top of that, similar to plants or animals, what microbe gets there first has a big impact on how the community develops.”

Understanding which biological or environmental factors spread important fungi might be a consideration in timing of controlled burns. If a fungus is key to the overall health of the ecosystem, but only spreads via wind, resource managers may plan for that.

In addition to the research at Ichauway, Scherick is working with Hall to build a mathematical model to understand how the interaction between plants and their microbial symbionts may shift under climate change. Associating with soil microbes can provide benefits for plants under stressful conditions, but these microbes also use plant resources. Changes in climate conditions could tip the balance between whether microbial symbionts become more beneficial or parasitic to their host plants.

“We are modifying a macroparasite model—typically used to describe how parasites like intestinal worms affect human or animal hosts—to capture the interaction between plants and their symbionts, where the number of symbionts affects plant growth,” she said. “We want to understand how the relationship between plants and their symbionts will change under different climate conditions.”

Bell hopes to validate predictions from this model through field and lab experiments in the Chung Lab. Scherick completed an undergraduate degree at Rice University, where she majored in ecology and evolutionary biology and minored in statistics. She came to UGA to study at Odum and Ichauway with the John Spencer Distinguished Fellowship at Ichauway grant. She is the first student to receive the scholarship, which was established in 2025 in memory of John Spencer, who was a graduate student at Odum when he died in 2016.