James Weedon, Assistant Professor
My research seeks to understand the biotic controls of terrestrial biogeochemical cycles, particularly of carbon and nitrogen. I am focused on below-ground processes and have conducted research into how plant traits affect the rates of plant litter decomposition, the role of microorganisms in soil nitrogen cycling, and the interactions between phenology of vegetation and the seasonality of microbial communities and associated biogeochemical transformations. I draw my research methods from traditional soil science, modern molecular microbial ecology, bioinformatics and statistical modeling. An emerging research interest is defining appropriate statistical models for high-throughput sequence data from environmental sequencing efforts.
Selected Publications
Weedon JT, Cornwell WK, Cornelissen JHC, Zanne AE, Wirth C, and Coomes DA (2009). Global meta-analysis of wood decomposition rates: a role for trait variation among tree species? Ecology Letters 12: 45-56.
Weedon JT, Kowalchuk GA, Aerts R, Van Hal JR, Van Logtestijn RKSP, Taş N, Röling WF, and Van Bodegom PM (2012). Summer warming accelerates sub-arctic peatland nitrogen cycling without changing enzyme pools or microbial community structure. Global Change Biology 18: 138-150.
Freschet GT, Weedon JT, Aerts R, Van Hal J, and Cornelissen JHC (2012). Interspecific differences in wood decay rates: insights from a new short-term method to study long-term wood decomposition. Journal of Ecology 100: 161-170.
Cornwell WK, and Weedon JT (2014). Modeling the decomposition trajectories of diverse litter types: a model selection analysis. Methods in Ecology and Evolution 5: 173-182.
Weedon JT, Kowalchuk GA, Aerts R, Freriks S, Röling WFM, and Van Bodegom PM (2017). Compositional Stability of the Bacterial Community in a Climate-Sensitive Sub-Arctic Peatland. Frontiers in Microbiology 8.