When confronted with the possibility of the earth's climate heating up, images of melting polar ice caps and rising oceans may come to mind. Jennifer Powers, however, is looking down at the soil. Her current research — funded by the National Science Foundation — considers how climate-warming scenarios might affect stored carbon in tropical forest soils.

Powers joined the Department of Soil, Water, and Climate as a post-doctoral research associate in March of 2004, and she will begin a position as an Assistant Professor in August 2006.

To begin her climate-warming project, she collected soil samples from six sites around the globe. Three of the sites lie in Central America (Costa Rica and Panama), two are in South America (Ecuador and French Guiana), and a sixth is in Thailand.

With a background in biogeochemistry, she brings a multi-disciplinary approach to her work. Says Powers, “biogeochemistry studies how life influences geochemical processes,” such as the transfer of carbon. “It looks at linkages between different earth systems.” Her faculty appointment at the university is split between three departments: Soil, Water, and Climate; Plant Pathology; and Ecology, Evolution, and Behavior.

She is excited that advances in lab tools are expanding possibilities in her field. One such example is the study of microbial communities. Jennifer is interested in how those communities respond to change in different areas of the world.

“Understanding microbial diversity is a wide open question,” she says. “We're just beginning to be able to ask those questions.”

Jennifer's research is unique because it examines tropical “dry” forests, rather than the familiar tropical rainforests where rain falls nearly every day. By contrast, dry forests in the tropics have alternating dry and monsoon seasons. During the dry season, they look more like deserts than rainforests. On the whole, Powers feels that tropical ecosystems are understudied compared to their temperate counterparts – but she hopes her work will help to fill in the knowledge gaps. Says Jennifer, “My work adds little pieces of the puzzle to help understand the bigger questions.”