Welcome to the Zanne Lab
Our research group focuses on interactions among plants, microbes and insects, and how they affect carbon cycling and global change under current and future projected climates. To explore these questions, we also study ecological, evolutionary, and biogeographic determinants of species distributions by measuring physiological, morphological, and anatomical functional traits. We explore ecosystem-level consequences of differences in species and trait distributions, for instance, traits of plants, microbes and insects that most affect rates and forms of C release with feedbacks to the earth system.
We ask these biogeochemical and macroevolutionary questions at the Department of Biology at the University of Miami in Coral Gables, FL, surrounded by plenty of tropical biology.
For the 2023 field season, Yuri (2nd year PhD student) has been kicking off his research projects in the Brazilian cerrado. Yuri has been sampling lots of termites across peatlands and savannas to describe the termite diversity in this system. He's also been learning to fly drones to understand the spatial distribution and density of termite mounds and murundus in the cerrado!
Amy has also been working in Brazil, as she has been based in Campinas for the past year. She has been looking to the cerrado for inspiration to understand carbon fluxes across different soil moisture gradients in savanna ecosystems.
Abbey (4th year PhD student) is also off to fieldwork, working in Queensland, Australia to measure termite mound carbon dioxide and methane fluxes. She is also working to write up many projects exploring how internal damage in trees changes the amount of carbon that they store.
If you are interested in joining the team please head to our vacancies page for more information. Thank you to the talented Donna Davis for designing the new Zanne Lab logo!
News
12. April 2024Congratulations to Abbey for receiving an NSF INTERN award through her GRFP. She will use this grant to study applications of LiDAR in forest ecology!
01. April 2024Yuri passed his PhD qualifying exams with flying colors - congrats!
01. January 2024Publication Alert! Congrats Baptiste for publishing a new paper in Functional Ecology on drivers of wood decay in tropical ecosystems. Give it a read here.
12. December 2023Publication Alert! Haba, a past postdoc in the lab, published a new paper in New Phytologist exploring internal stem damage along a tropical precipitation gradient. Give it a read here.
10. October 2023Abbey had her termite methane reserach highlighted on the Australian Wildlife Conservancy webpage, check it out here!
20. July 2023The Zanne Lab is coming back to Miami - Baptiste has moved to continue working on his postdoc with the lab and Amy is back from sabbatical in Brazil!
7. April 2023Abbey successfully completed her proposal defense - congrats!
22. September 2022A huge congratulations to Amy for coordinating and publishing a global wood decomposition study recently published in Science. There's lots of buzz about this paper, so check out other summaries and interviews in this popular science article and this podcast. Not to mention, the study is featured on the cover of Science!
22. August 2022This semester the Zanne Lab welcomes two new members to the team - Baptiste Wijas (postdoc) and Yuri Silva de Souza (PhD student). We're excited to have such wonderful additions to our growing team here in Miami!