| Affiliations: | Aggie Research Mentoring Program |
| Project Leader: | Ayush Joshi Gyawali ayushg7@tamu.edu Soil and Crop Sciences |
| Faculty Mentor: | Peyton Smith, Ph.D. |
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Meeting Times:
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TBD |
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Team Size:
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4 |
| Open Spots: | 0 |
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Special Opportunities:
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Students will have opportunities to perform both field and lab-scale soil research. Field work includes sampling soils and measuring greenhouse gases in a variety of cattle pastures. In the lab, we encourage students to learn the tools and techniques for carbon and microbial parameters quantification. There is also potential for student/s to present their research at conferences, contribute to publications, and be hired after the program ends |
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Team Needs:
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Interest in soils, ability to travel out of town and work outside in potentially hot and humid conditions. Willingness to learn new techniques and work in a team, attention to detail is preferred. Prior knowledge of soil science or any soil related work is a bonus. |
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Description:
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North American grasslands cover ~1.5 million square kilometers and consist mainly of tall, mixed, and short grass prairies that provide valuable ecosystem services including C storage and forage for livestock and wild herbivores. How we manage our grazing land can alter the quality and quantity of ecosystem services. Continuous grazing (CG), a traditional and commonly used practice, is when cattle graze a pasture for an extended amount of time with no, or infrequent rest to the plant from grazing. CG approach to livestock production often leads to area selective grazing with spatially highly varied forage utilization that can lead to substantial bare ground and soil erosion in preferred areas and moribund plant matter in underutilized areas. Thus, CG practices can lead to decrease in C storage and hence decrease in the health of the soil. To counter these drawbacks from CG, Adaptive multi-paddock (AMP) grazing is being forwarded as an alternate grazing system. AMP grazers use high livestock densities for short durations between long periods of forage rest to catalyze accelerated grass growth. Our objective is to test whether soil carbon dynamics and health of the soil improves under AMP management. Under this broad objective, we will dive into widely used soil health quantification techniques, carbon fractionation methods as well as soil microbial techniques. |