The Antarctic fieldseason 2009-10

Hi All

Just give you a quick update regarding the nemablog. Due to a very busy year we haven’t had time to keep the blog up to date but as usual we will do our best to update you about our field season while we’re in Antarctica.

After a busy summer we’re finally about ready to head down to our research site in the McMurdo Dry Valleys, Antarctica, for the fieldseason of 2009-10. We have spent a large part of our time since last season making sure the samples we (you can see the field crew in the picture below) collected in 2008-09 included in our soils archive here at Colorado State University and doing biological and chemical analysis on some extra samples to have complete data sets for all of our many experiments. After we got all of our data up to date we have presented our results at several large conferences around the world.

The Wormherders anno 2008-09 (from left): Karen Seaver, Nick Demetras, Bishwo Adhikari, Tracy Smith, Uffe Nielsen, Byron Adams, Breana Simmons, Diana Wall

Our field crew this year is slightly smaller than last year. Of the 8 that went down last season 4 (Diana H. Wall, Byron Adams, Bishwo Adhikari and Uffe N. Nielsen) will be there again and we’ll have one new member of the Wormherders, Zach Sylvain, who is a graduate student in the Soil Biology and Ecosystem Functioning Lab (http://rydberg.biology.colostate.edu/sites/walllab/people/zachary-sylvain/)

The Wormherders