Back to Projects

Top: Lyman Glacier and its forefront in 2009.

Bottom: Chad and Laura Fox at the glacier forefront

In this project, we examine a glacier foreland in the North Cascades mountains in Washington State to better understand microbial community assembly.

Thus far, we have sampled canopy and inter-canopy soils at various distances from the glacier.

Pyrosequencing of fungal and bacterial variable gene regions indicate that, although richness does not differ over distance or between the canopy and inter-canopy soils, the canopy communities are clustered relative to non-vegetated intercanopy soils. Quantitative real-time PCR indicates that both fungal and bacterial biomasses increase over the chronosequence, whereas plants may have a lesser effect.