The DNA of Soils

Since 2020, Michael has been teaching in the biology department and collaborating in various student senior thesis research projects in the fascinating world of forest ecology and resource management. Before transitioning to teaching full-time at Fort Lewis, Michael worked with the non-profit Mountain Studies Institute and developed relationships with land management agencies, tribes, and other stakeholders to implement more rigorous science in the San Juan Mountain region that informs land management decisions. Michael works closely with collaborators at Colorado Forest Restoration Institute at Colorado State University and the Ecological Restoration Institute at Northern Arizona University and has some exciting new projects in association with ResotreNET and other dryland research sites.

Michael’s research interest ranges widely from soil ecology to plant community ecology, specifically in drylands and forests.  Michael is a member of the Society of American Foresters, Ecological Society of America, Mycological Society of America, Soil Ecology Society, and the American Association for the Advancement of the Sciences.

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Published Papers

Science Moab: Can you tell us what you’ve been working on recently?

Remke: A lot of my work has been really focused on this idea that plants and their associated mycorrhizal fungi are coadapted to one another. I’ve been particularly interested in testing if a plant and its coadapted mycorrhizal fungi provide the same benefit to each other as a plant living in symbiosis with a novel suite of soil organisms. In other words, if we disrupt that coadapted lifestyle, how does the plant perform when trying to make new friends? I like to further that by testing what happens when we force plants to live with new friends in new climatic environments. Do they benefit from their coadapted good symbiotic friends or do they actually receive more benefit from trying to make friends with the biota that have lived in the new environment in which plants are trying to live?

Science Moab: Why should people care about revegetation and mycorrhizal relationships?

Remke: We’ve seen lots of disturbance on the Colorado Plateau from increased grazing and drought stress. And the result has been more bare soil that’s very susceptible to wind erosion. I think we’ve generally seen an increase in frequency in some of those dust storms, which can be a public health issue, cause driving hazards, and get deposited on mountain snowpack and accelerate snow melt. That can have changes for the amount of water in the Colorado River Basin. And there is a dire need to start restoring some of these landscapes that have degraded and one important interest is learning how to better restore plant communities so that we can have vegetative plant cover that helps stabilize soil, prevent some of that erosion, and provides forage for our native ungulates as well as domestic cattle. I think we need to ask ourselves why we need to revegetate a site. If soil disturbance that could have altered native mycorrhizal communities is part of why, then we have compelling reasons to believe that we could increase the drought resistance of ponderosa pine seedlings that are planted by inoculating them with native mycorrhizal communities. Understanding when and where we can enhance restoration success with soil organisms is a really important perspective on some of these revegetation strategies.

Science Moab: How do you measure whether a mycorrhizal community remains intact after disturbance, and what are some examples of when it has or hasn’t done so?

Remke: How we measure microbial communities is a really important one. We haven’t had the tools to measure microbial communities until relatively recently, and now those tools are becoming cheaper. We’re talking about next generation sequencing, an advanced DNA extraction procedure, followed by amplifying genes of multiple organisms within a single sample to understand a microbial community. For fire, the first things to consider are the intensity and severity of the fire. Where fire burns at low intensity on the edge, there’s almost no change to the soil microbial communities, even at the soil surface. But as you move to the center of the fire, and the intensity gets hotter, we start to see significant loss or sterilization of the soil, even up to like 30 centimeters in depth. Some of the work that I’ve been doing in southwest Colorado has shown that at depths of 30 centimeters in low severity or moderate severity fire, microbial communities are totally unaffected by fire. But when you get to high severity fire, 30 centimeters of depth starts to see some alteration of soil microbial communities. We’re starting to learn now that the recolonization of soil microbes following an event like fire can take a really long time. But we’re also starting to show that recolonization does occur, and it generally occurs from depth upward. Soil depths of 50 centimeters are starting to contribute to the recovery of soil depths of 30 centimeters in high severity fires. We don’t know how long it takes to re-establish a community that was there prior. It might be that it never happens if the plant community is forever altered. 

Science Moab: How can your research make a difference in the realm of forest preservation?

Remke: Where we can make a difference is in knowing that intact ecosystems are really important. That means a few things for management and mitigation of fires. The classic forest restoration perspective is really important to remember: removing small trees, but preserving large, older trees on the landscape, can help reduce fire risk, while also helping support the intact ecosystem that does exist. An important piece of that is letting fire have its natural role as much as it can. It certainly feels like we have had a significant hand in altering ecosystems, letting fire become more intense through climate change. One thing that my research really enlightened me to is the fact that ecosystems are really complex, and anywhere where intact ecosystems do exist are opportunities to preserve them. If we feel that we want something, we can use what we know about ecosystems to manifest it with some degree of intentionality. So if we want to restore forests, we have to restore ecosystems. That means having a perspective on soil biota, which might help us better achieve our goals.