Current Research Projects

The Big Picture: The overall goal of our research is to understand how different ecosystem restoration choices alter soil microbial communities and soil health. Restoration and management decisions made by landowners have the potential to improve many below-ground properties, including soil carbon storage. Understanding how land use change influences microbial communities and how re-integrating natural areas into agricultural and urban landscapes are important strategies for addressing climate change. While we focus on how different management practices influence the biology of microorganisms, our projects involve many collaborations and involve public engagement, outreach and education. Much of our research involves partnerships with southwest Michigan non-profit conservation organizations.

If you would like more information about a specific project or are interested in joining the research group, please reach out to Kathryn using this contact form.

Here are three themes of our lab's research. For a non-scientist’s description of the Docherty MicroEco Lab’s research see HERE.

Photo: A small prairie installed in a marginal area at KBS. (credit K. Docherty)

1. How do land management choices influence soil microbial community restoration?

Agricultural management practices, such as long-term tilling, fertilization, and monocropping, has a significant impact on soil bacterial and fungal community composition and soil structure. Michigan farmers, land owners and conservation agencies interested in restoring areas of their property face several choices when considering where and how to install native prairies. Using the Conservation Lands Experiment (CLE), installed in marginal areas by our collaborator Dr. Lars Brudvig at Michigan State University and his colleagues, we are investigating whether the diversity of the seed mix used in a restoration and the size of the restoration influence soil microbial communities, carbon storage and microbial carbon-use efficiency. We published a review paper discussing this topic in 2022.

The CLE was originally installed at Kellogg Biological Station in 2015. Twelve reclaimed old fields were planted in a split-plot design with either 12 or 70 species. The CLE sites have been managed using prescribed fire since installation. We have conducted two sampling efforts to examine how:

1) Different seed mixes and sizes of restorations influence spatial heterogeneity of soil bacterial and fungal communities at site and landscape scales.

2) The two restored prairie seed mix types compare to adjacent old fields and conventional agricultural fields with respect to POM/MAOM fractionation, carbon-use efficiency and other soil health parameters.

Funding: NSF Mid-Career Advancement Award (Docherty, Frey)

Photo: Prairie strip at the Edward Lowe Foundation (credit K. Docherty)

2. How do prairie strips influence soil health in agricultural systems?

Prairie strips, or prairie conservation corridors, are a sustainable agricultural practice that are included in the US Farm Bill as a Conservation Reserve Program strategy to improve ecosystem services provided by agricultural land. Prairie strips have been well-studied on corn-soy rotation farms in Iowa, but they are somewhat of a novelty in Michigan, where there are more diverse cropping systems, orchards, berry and dairy farms. Collaborating Dr. Christine Sprunger (KBS) and Dr. Liz Schultheis (KBS) and the MiSTRIPS program, this project investigates how a chronosequence of prairie strips in Michigan affect a variety of soil health parameters. The information we learn through this project will be integrated into a publicly available partial budget, which will help land owners make decisions about how and where it is economically feasible to include prairie strips in their management plans.

This project leverages prairie strips located in the Long-Term Agroecosystem Research sites at Kellogg Biological Station, six on-farm sites with local farmer partners and four of the oldest prairie strips in Michigan located at the Edward Lowe Foundation. Specific questions we will address are:

1) Do Michigan prairie strips have similar effects on soil health across many different sites with different land use histories?

2) Is there an age at which the belowground benefits of a prairie strip levels out, and has soil health improved enough for the strip to be used for crop rotation?

3) How do we meaningfully include soil health parameters into the partial budget model to enable land owners to make decisions about how strips affect crop yields?

Funding: USDA Sustainable Agricultural Research and Education (Sprunger, Docherty, Schultheis)

3. How do regenerative agricultural practices affect vegetable nutrient content and soil health?

Regenerative agriculture is a term that encompasses many practices to improve soil health, agricultural sustainability and ecosystem stability. In smaller vegetable farms, regenerative agricultural practices are becoming more popular and can be straightforward to implement, but further information is required to determine which practices results in food with the greatest nutrient density.

This project leverages an ongoing experiment with Dr. Steve Bertman (WMU) and Delano Farms director Kirsten Clemente (Kalamazoo Nature Center) to investigate the benefits of several regenerative agricultural practices in a fully-crossed design. Experimental manipulations include composting, cover-cropping and chemical fertilization. This experiment has a lot of public exposure, since it is on a CSA farm that is open to the public and located near the E Avenue trailhead for the Kalamazoo Nature Center.

Funding: WMU College of Arts and Sciences Interdisciplinary Research Award (Bertman, Docherty)

Photo: WMU students sampling soil at the Regenerative Agriculture Experiment at Delano Farms in June 2024. (credit S. Bertman)