2019 Topic: The Secret Life of Moss: Using Tiny Plants to Gain Big Insights into Ecosystem Ecology and Climate Change
Biography:
Kirsten K. Coe is a plant ecophysiologist, focusing on how environmental stress shapes plant performance and growth, and in turn how plant responses influence ecosystem level processes. She uses mosses as a model system to answer questions in this domain, focusing on ecosystems where they carry large ecological importance, often as keystone species. The Coe lab applies a combination of field manipulation experiments, stable isotope analysis, and laboratory photosynthetic stress assessment using infrared gas analysis and chlorophyll fluorescence. Two current lab research foci include (1) an NSF-funded project exploraing the ecological, physiological, and genetic basis of desiccation tolerance in Syntrichia, a diverse clade of dryland mosses; and (2) the influence of symbioses between nitrogen-fixing cyanobacteria and peatland mosses on nitrogen cycling.