Joe Edwards

🚨 Early Career Researcher Travel Award! 🚨

Open to grad students & postdocs presenting at #ICOM2026
@ICOM2026

Apply now!

All info👉 url-shortener.me/6QQF

🗓️ Deadline: Nov 14, 2025
📢 Decisions: Jan 30, 2026

They aren’t fun emails to receive, but I deeply appreciate it when a job I applied for lets me know I’m not being considered anymore. It’s so crazy to me this only happens maybe 10% of the time.

Upstream data need to prove soil carbon as a climate solution - Nature Climate Change Causal approaches employed at the scale of commercial agriculture are required to build high-quality evidence that climate-smart agricultural interventions result in real emissions reductions and removals. Such project-scale empirical data are additionally required to demonstrate and advance the viability of process-based models and digital measurement, reporting and verification as tools to scale soil carbon accounting.

📢📢📢 New peer-reviewed Comment in @springernature.com Climate Change authored by @yalecncc.bsky.social Scientific Leadership Team member and Yale School of the Environment Professor Mark Bradford on "Upstream data need to prove soil carbon as a climate solution." www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Feels so good when a new(ish) paper gets its first citation :)

Chinese ICE Detainee Dies by Suicide at Pennsylvania Detention Center A Chinese ICE detainee died by suicide at Pennsylvania’s Moshannon Valley detention center in Pennsylvania, a private jail run by GEO Group.

People are dying in concentration camps in the USA run by US ICE.

Got a grant rejection today with some very valuable feedback. Apparently 3 months after a disturbance is too late to start sampling, but anything before a year is too early. I’ll keep that in mind for next time!

What are all these soil fungi doing? Complex carbon use ability as a predictive trait for fungal community functions Fungal communities in soil play important roles in decomposition processes and soil organic carbon cycling. These communities are tremendously diverse, making it challenging to assign relevant functio...

Happy to share this big piece on saprobic fungal traits and soil carbon cycling. Great collaboration in the SPP SoilSystems @dfg.de , with Damien Finn, Sören Thiele-Bruhn, Denise Vonhoegen, @mrillig.bsky.social and many others contributing to the study. www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1...

So awesome, congrats dude!!

I’m thrilled to announce that next summer I’ll be joining the University of Maryland Department of Biology as an assistant professor! The Van Etten lab will study how horizontal processes (DNA and gene transfer + organelle acquisition) drive and are driven by ecology and evolution. vanettenlab.org

Plant phylogeny and life history predict AM fungal species and genetic composition, but only life history and genetic composition predict feedback https://www.biorxiv.org/content/10.1101/2025.07.10.664051v1

It was deposited by the root at some point!

Yeah @hannahshulman.bsky.social and I were talking about this a little while ago, I think we agreed that rhizodeposition was any carbon that leaves the roots (including mycorrhizae) but exudation was specifically putting low-molecular weight carbon straight into the soil. What do you think?

I have separate side pots with different size mesh for root exclusion to partition root and fungal carbon

Labeling chambers are up and running so these dual-mycorrhizal plants are incorporating 13-CO2 to measure how much they give their fungal mutualists

Excited to be talking about where rarity comes from and how it persists through evolutionary time tomorrow at #Evol2025! Swing by the Evolutionary Ecology IV session at 4:45 PM to hear more about the evolution of multidimensional rarity in plants 🌱

Warming Disrupts Plant–Fungal Endophyte Symbiosis More Severely in Leaves Than Roots Warmer temperatures associated with climate change disrupt relationships between plants and the fungi living in their leaves and roots by reducing the abundance and diversity of these fungi—especiall...

Fungal endophytes may not be a reliable way to improve plant resilience to global change. Warmer temperatures disrupt symbiosis between plants and fungal endophytes by reducing fungal colonization and diversity in plant tissues, with stronger effects in leaves than roots.
dx.doi.org/10.1111/gcb....

Acomplished a meaningless goal in my dumb game and now all the serotonin is gone

Friendly reminder that it’s very, very cool to not use AI art as a journal cover

Cones and consequences: the false dichotomy of conifers vs broad‐leaves has critical implications for research and modelling In plant science research and modelling, particularly from the northern hemisphere, the terms ‘needle-leaved’ and ‘conifer’ along with ‘broad-leaved’ and ‘angiosperm’ are often used synonymously, cre...

Did you ever wonder when to use "conifer", "gymnosperm", "needleleaf", "angiosperms" and "broadleaves"? Us too so we transformed the discussion into this viewpoint. I hope you enjoy the reading as much as we enjoyed the writing! @kateplantphys.bsky.social nph.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/full/10....

Bacteriophages as important considerations for mycorrhizal symbioses in our changing world Bacteriophages, bacteria, and mycorrhizal fungi are key members of plant microbiomes, yet connections among them remain unexplored. This forum article highlights the potential importance of bacterioph...

Bacteriophages as important considerations for mycorrhizal symbioses in our changing world

@cp-trendsmicrobiol.bsky.social Forum by @louberrios.bsky.social

www.cell.com/trends/micro...

Warming Disrupts Plant–Fungal Endophyte Symbiosis More Severely in Leaves Than Roots Warmer temperatures associated with climate change disrupt relationships between plants and the fungi living in their leaves and roots by reducing the abundance and diversity of these fungi—especiall...

Fungal endophytes may not be a reliable way to improve plant resilience to global change. Warmer temperatures disrupt symbiosis between plants and fungal endophytes by reducing fungal colonization and diversity in plant tissues, with stronger effects in leaves than roots.
dx.doi.org/10.1111/gcb....

Ectomycorrhizal trees can have unique impacts on soils Joseph D. Edwards, James W. Dalling, Jennifer M. Fraterrigo, William C. Eddy, Wendy H Yang This is a Functional Ecology research article which can be found here. Trees that associate with ectomycor…

📰 Published📰 Ectomycorrhizal trees can have unique impacts on soils🌳

🧪🌍

Thanks, hope you enjoy!

Functional traits of ectomycorrhizal trees influence surrounding soil organic matter properties Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.

We need to think more critically in how we use tree mycorrhizal status to predict forest ecosystem function. Important intra-guild variation among ectomycorrhizal trees leads to differences in soil biogeochemistry and organic matter properties.
besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/...

WATCH: “Are you going to Brian Kelsey’s pardon party this weekend?”

We asked Republican senators if they scored an invite to the Memphis Republican ex-Senator’s party to celebrate his Trump pardon after serving 2 weeks in prison for federal campaign finance crimes he pleaded guilty to.

The last chapter of my dissertation was accepted for publication today, three years to the day (basically) from my defense!

Oscar-winning Palestinian director is attacked by Jewish settlers and detained, activists say Activists say Israeli settlers beat up one of the Palestinian co-directors of the Oscar-winning film “No Other Land” in the occupied West Bank, and he was then detained by the Israeli military.

Israeli settlers beat up one of the Palestinian co-directors of the Oscar-winning film “No Other Land” in the occupied West Bank on Monday, and he was then detained by the Israeli military, activists on the scene said.

The National Science Foundation is one of America's most precious gems

Laughed a little too hard at this, maybe it’s time to close that R session…

Long letter from NSF Director Sethuraman Panchanathan, available here: https://nsf-gov-resources.nsf.gov/files/Letter-to-the-Community.pdf

🧪 The NSF director is lying to you.

Let’s fact check 7 claims from yesterday’s letter to the community, while pointing out 3 critical omissions. 🧵