Lana Wheatley

As someone who has experience researching in indoor lab environments only, this summer was an entirely new experience for me. Though what I was studying—fungi—is the same as I have been studying for a year or so, both the field sampling and understanding how fungi might interact with plants proved to be a challenge for me this summer. It’s easy to overlook the physical work that might go into collecting samples from field experiments, but I could see firsthand how valuable each data point was. Walking through shoulder-height switchgrass on a GLBRC site, pollen washing over me, and taking a soil core all for a single point of data would end up showing me that. 

Over the past couple of months, I worked with the Evans lab at the Kellogg Biological Station to investigate the impact of nitrogen fertilization on fungal colonization of switchgrass roots. Being a part of the microbiology lab, I was able to spend much of my time looking though microscopes and become quite friendly with the fungi I was investigating! Discovering patterns and seeing important fungal traits up close opened my eyes to a new microscopic world while I was busy exploring the macroscopic one outside of KBS. I visited the dunes in Saugatuck, camped out in Charlevoix, and swam in Lake Michigan and Gull Lake countless times. My worldview was altered just a little this summer, and I am forever grateful for the experiences I have had because of this program.