My name is Aisha Sams. I'm a master's student at Oklahoma State University, and I am studying Eastern red cedar encroachment into native prairies. My specific focus is on ecosystem carbon status between encroached and non encroached areas. So we're looking at the amount of carbon that's stored in the soil and the depth at which it's stored in the soil between prairies and prairies that are encroached by Eastern Red Cedars.


And we're also focusing on the microbial community, specifically arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, which plays a really important role in carbon sequestration in the soil. And I'm also expanding this research to look at other above ground consequences too, such as soil carbon and water dynamics, but also wildfire risk impacts on wildlife habitat and forage productivity for livestock production, other ecosystem functions and services.


So in the field, usually I am out there before sun up or right at sun up first light we start by running our transects, which are like really long measuring tapes, and we run three or four transects in the prairie and three or four transects in the encroached areas or around the encroached areas. And I start out by going along these lines and I have this frame, it's called a dobbin myer frame.


I put it down at a point and I do species composition, so I identify each plant that's in that frame and how much of the frame it covers. I do that along all of my lines, both in the eastern red cedar area and in the prairie. And then I take clippings of all of this vegetation, too. So once I've identified everything in the frame and I've determined the percent covers, I clip the whole thing like it's been grazed, put it in a bag, and then I collect all of the litter.


That's left over. After I get done with vegetation and litter collections, then I move on to my soil cores and my soil samples So I go along these transects and I take about ten soil samples per transect. So in the prairie I have this drill with the soil auger apparatus and we take a bucket it's got a hole in the bottom of it.


I drill down into the soil and it fills up the bucket and I take all of these samples, put them in a big bag that way. I've got multiple points across the prairie area that I can compare to the points that I've collected in the Eastern Red Cedar Encroached area. After I've collected all of my soil samples, I go back along the transects and I take root samples.


So I am in the prairie area. I find a nice prairie plant. It's usually some sort of bunched grass. It's a native plant and I just dig under it until I've got a ball of roots and dirt and then I put those in plastic bags, stick them in a cooler because we want to keep them cool so the microbes don't freak out or anything or stop doing their work and we take those back to the lab, store those until I get to my lab work.


So the first thing I do when I get back from my field work is I take all of my clippings and all of my litter samples and I go and I put those in big drying ovens. And the reason we do that is we want to dry them down to dry weight. And then I get weights for all of them, and I convert that to biomass.


And we compare the biomass found in prairie areas to what we find in the eastern red cedar encroached areas. And the reason this is important is because it characterizes the loss of not only forage productivity but wildlife habitat, because these prairie ecosystems have so much more plant community and just plant biomass than the eastern red cedar understory does.


The more aggregates you have, particularly the more macro aggregates you have in the soil, the more stable it is to withstand things like water and wind erosion. Aggregation is largely a metric to determine how resistant that soil is to erosion and how stable the soil is. So the reason I collect roots is because we use them to see arbuscular mycorrhizal fungal colonization,


so, the relative abundance or how many and to what degree these roots are colonized by mycorrhizae. Most native plant species in prairie ecosystems have symbiotic relationships with A M fungi and in exchange for giving the A M fungi, carbon, the A M fungi help these species get other resources like phosphorus, nitrogen. They can help them extend their root systems further into the soil, into areas that are hard to penetrate, particularly clay soils, which a lot of prairies are clay.


So with my root samples we wash them, dry them, we dye them with trypan blue, and then we go through on a microscope and we use this fancy grid method where we read roots and we can determine how many or an estimate of how colonized the roots are with A M fungi. So in Eastern Red Cedar Sands, we have found that A M fungal abundance is actually higher compared to the prairie areas, but it's a less diverse suite of a fungal species.


So even though they have more of them in their roots and more of them that are helping them get these resources, they're only selecting for a couple species here and there. Whereas in the native prairie areas, we see really high colonization levels, but with much more diverse broad arrays of species or genuses. We found the eastern red cedar can kind of not necessarily entice A M fungi away from grasses but A M fungi tend to prefer to associate with eastern red cedars over native grasses because they are photosynthesizing all year.


And so since they're an evergreen plant, they're constantly active and they're constantly supplying carbon to those fungi. Whereas in the fall here in Oklahoma, our native grasses go dormant, they senesce and send all of their energy below ground and they're not worried about the A M fungi either, not giving them carbon during the winter months because they don't have anything to do with the carbon.


They're not photosynthesizing. So a lot of those fungi are attracted to Eastern Red Cedar because they have a year-round supply of carbon in greater quantities. That's also easier for them to process. So for fun, I do a lot of hiking and camping. I hike a lot, and I also do a lot of fly fishing now. I just got into that over the past year and a half, two years.


Um, so on the weekends, a typical weekend for me when I'm not doing field work is to go out to Osage County, Oklahoma. There's a WMA up there that I, I'm really partial to. It's called Western Wall, and it's the perfect mix of Tallgrass Prairie and Cross Timbers Forest And in the summer, I go out there and we hike and go around, look for fossils.


There's a ton of fossils out there. Um, I love to take pictures of them. I love to take pictures of all of the native plants that I see along my way. That's another one of my hobbies. And then after we're done walking for the day, we typically go find a pond or a creek or something to kind of sit down and hang out by.


And I'll pull out my fly rod and fish. Yeah. So that's usually what I'm doing. But if I'm not doing that, I travel a lot. Um, I have a lot of friends and family all across the US. Um, I'm originally from Georgia. So I go back home in the summer and in the winter usually. And I do a lot of hiking there because I'm from the southern Appalachian Mountains.


So I grew up in a really beautiful place to hike and camp and um, I also have friends that live in the Rocky Mountains and I get to go see a lot and I hike out there a lot, so I just stay outside. Really. If I'm not fishing, I'm hiking. If I'm not hiking, I'm taking pictures of rocks and plants.


So growing up, my view out of our porch door was pasture and then mountains rising above the pasture. And we had horses and my neighbors had cattle and I would go play in the pasture playing the cow ponds go find different things, bugs, rocks, all kinds of stuff. And, um, I was also really lucky to have an aunt that encouraged me a lot.


She, um, she kept me a lot when I was little and my mom was working, and so we would go outside to her garden and work in the garden or we would go on like hikes to Fort Mountain State Park, and we would make it kind of an educational activity where if I found something, we had all of these Audubon bird books and wildflower books, and we would try to identify it or at least figure out what it was, or if I had a question about what some animal was doing or why a plant looks that way, we try to figure it out.


And I attribute a lot of that curiosity to her fostering it because she was always, any time I had a question, it was always "let's find out, let's see, you know, let's look it up and see what we can find". But I also had an aunt that lived in Idaho Falls for a long time when I was little.


And so we would go out and visit her and go see Yellowstone. And some of my earliest memories are seeing bison and elk in Yellowstone and calling them pup pups. I remember doing the Junior Ranger program when I was like four or five. For someone that wants to enter ecology, I would tell them to take every opportunity they have and it might not necessarily even pertain to ecology.


Take every opportunity you have, whether it's agriculture or natural resources, science, math, technology, anything in the realm of science, at least try it out because you never know when it's going to apply to something else. Um, I come from an agriculture background. I started out college in agribusiness. That's what I thought that I would end up majoring in.


And later on down the road I figured out that's really not what I wanted to do. I'd rather be in ecology. When I figured out what ecology was, it was what I'd been looking for for a really long time. And now in my career, I can see how agribusiness prepped me for a lot of things. Um, in ecology, sometimes you don't necessarily have the same perspective


someone from agriculture would. And I'm really, really, really grateful that I took so many different opportunities along my path to find this career because I have so many different perspectives that I use. One of the overarching objectives of this EPSCOR project is to find solutions to problems that lie at the intersection of agriculture, culture and ecology. And my projects specifically highlights this because Eastern red cedar encroachment isn't just impacting prairies.


It's not just impacting livestock production. It's not just impacting ecosystem carbon status. It's something that we all have to deal with in some capacity. Um, whether it's you're losing carbon sequestration in the soil, that's not only important to agricultural producers and ecologists. That's important to everybody, especially going into climate change and needing carbon sinks. We have to characterize those changes and my project


also takes into account the impacts on agricultural production, specifically, uh, like livestock production and grazing and what we're losing as far as forage goes or forage productivity. And um, of course we're also looking at soil carbon and water dynamics and water is a huge issue, particularly in semi-arid arid areas like Oklahoma. Um, if Eastern Red Cedars have an effect on ecosystem carbon cycling and water cycling, that's really important for water supply and demand, too, because those two are almost inextricably linked.


My first year at Oklahoma State University, I applied for this research technician job and it was working on my favorite place on Earth, which is the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in Pawhuska, Oklahoma. And I had always dreamed after the first time I saw that place, I wanted to go back and I wanted to do some sort of field work there or just be able to get out there and see the whole thing.


So I applied for this technician job. It was for I think it was greater prairie chickens looking at greater prairie chicken movements on the tallgrass prairie. And it would be a whole summer internship type deal. It was like my dream, and I was really invested in it. And so I send in my resume. I sent in this really nice email and the cover letter and everything, and then a couple of weeks go by I check in.


The guy never even emailed me back. He never got back with me at all. And so after that, I was really discouraged about even trying to get involved in research. I was very discouraged about being in ecology in general because I thought, maybe this isn't for me and I shouldn't be doing this type of work, or that it just wasn't supposed to work out.


Not even a year later. I'm in class one day and the professor is gone and we have a test. So one of his grad students comes to give us the test and he randomly asks, "Are any of you in here rangeland ecology and management majors?" And that was like "Me, right here, front row, hi!" And he was like, "Okay, awesome,


well, I'm looking for a technician for some field work. So just come by and see me after class." So after class, I try to come by and see him. But he had already left. He left the building early, actually. He just dropped off the test and didn't come back. So a week later, I went up to the professor after he was back and I was like, "You know that guy that said he had a job for a range major?


What exactly is that job? And can I do it?" And the professor says, "Oh, it's fieldwork and lab work. He works on the Tallgrass Prairie Preserve in Pawhuska and he's looking for someone to do some data entry and organization and then maybe fieldwork later on down the road." And that sold me, I said, "I'm in. Here's my email, here's my phone number, whatever else you need, I'll send it your way immediately."


And I did get that tech job, and that was it was amazing because that's what I had wanted the whole time. It just took me a little bit longer to get there than I had anticipated after that season as a field technician on that project, about a year later, I was talking to this guy. I was already in grad school, so he was a previous boss at this point.


And he said that I was the girl that had changed his mind about hiring girls to do field work because before me, he only hired male technicians. He thought that males were better suited for 13, 14 hour days in the hot sun in July in the prairie with no shade. And he didn't think a girl could get out there and work that hard and deal with all of the sunburn,


bug bites, no bathroom breaks, long days, no sleep. But I did it and we actually increased our efficiency and doubled the speed which we moved through his research plots. We left that season two weeks early actually, so I was really, really proud of that. And I was proud that I got to change someone's mind about letting girls do hard things because we can and usually we can do it better. So now we're going to do the Soil Your Underpants activity, which helps us visualize microbial the microbial community activity in the soil.


You will need a pair of 100% cotton tighty whities just like this. Now, the top of this pair of underwear is actually an elastic waistband. So this might not necessarily decompose since it's not 100% cotton, but the rest of them or the rest of the underpants is cotton. And cotton is an organic substance that microbes can eat as their food, which they will break down


this pair of underwear. And after we bury it and then dig it back up after a couple of months, we'll see how much of it they ate and how active the microbial community is in the soil. So first you're going to want to find a spot where you want to know what the microbial community is doing in the soil or how active the microbial community is.


I've chosen this prairie area here and we are going to dig a hole to put the underpants in. You want to go about ten centimeters deep, not too much deeper than that because most of the microbial activity is actually in the top ten centimeters of the soil or the top layer of the soil. So we will dig a spot to bury this underwear.


So after you dig about ten centimeters down you place the underwear in the hole. And I'm going to kind of bunch mine up a little bit today because I don't have very much space in this hole. But if you're trying this activity with your class or at home, you might want to see if burying it more flat and covering more area in the top ten centimeters of the soil has an impact on how much of the underwear is eaten by the microbes.


But for today, we'll just get it all the way in and then you cover it back up. So after you have buried your underwear and covered it back up with soil, if you don't remember exactly where you put it or if the spot isn't marked you can use a flag, a piece of flagging tape, put it in the soil right above your underwear.


You can come back in two months, maybe even a little bit longer, and dig it up and see what kind of microbes ate your underpants. So to test this out in different environments, to determine what type of environment might have more or less microbial activity in the soil, you can take a couple different spots. I use this prairie area.


You can pick maybe a more sandy area. You might want to bury it in a sandbox or you might want to go somewhere where there is a lot of human activity maybe even bury it in a garden and see which type of environment has the most microbial activity once you dig them up. So here are some of our results from different environments and I am excited to see your results and how soiled your underpants are.