‘Fertilizing Nature:

Date/Time
Thursday, November 3, 2016
7:00 pm - 9:00 pm

Location
Lewis Ginter Botanical Garden

Categories No Categories

Our program for the November meeting will be “Fertilizing Nature: Short-term Effects of Nutrients on a Barrier Island Grassland Community”. Our speaker will be Ashley Moulton. She will be sharing with us the results of her nutrient application study and presenting important implications on how functional diversity of plant communities can be altered from global and local disturbances in coastal systems. Ashley is a young and curious plant ecologist, with loads of enthusiasm for all things green. She is currently a master’s student at VCU’s Coastal Plant Ecology Lab and works on one of the 14 undeveloped barrier islands off the Delmarva peninsula, that makes up the Virginia Coastal Reserve, owned by TNC. Her research interests include understanding how feedbacks between abiotic (nonliving) and biotic (living) factors influence the distribution of vegetation in coastal landscapes. Ashley also works full time as an Agricultural and Natural Resources Technician for an Extension Office in Chesterfield, VA. Her experiences in urban nutrient management helped her develop her Master’s research project, where she questioned how plant communities respond to nutrient limited conditions that historically have limited plant growth in coastal barrier island systems.