[Plsfaculty] SPLS: Seminar by Alonso Favela today in EEB

[Arnold, Betsy - (fungi)]

Dear colleagues,

Today's seminar in EEB will be given by our own Alonso Favela. Please consider joining if you'd like to hear the latest in Alonso's growing research program. Details are below.

Warm regards,

Betsy



We look forward to welcoming our EEB speaker, Alonso Favela
Today, 3 pm, ENR2 S107 and on Zoom)
(https://arizona.zoom.us/j/86146298580 / password: UAEEB)

Cultivating Ancient Roots: Rewilding the Agricultural Microbiome for a Sustainable Future
In just a century, humanity has become a planetary force, radically reshaping the ecology and evolution of life on Earth. Nowhere is this clearer than in modern agroecosystems; technological triumphs have fed billions but left agriculture fragile, destabilized ecosystems, and accelerated climate change. Transforming these systems for resilience and sustainability demands a radical rethinking of how we manage them, with many pointing to microbiome “harnessing” as the next revolution. Yet we still lack a fundamental understanding of agroecosystem microbiomes and the lasting imprint of industrialization. This talk explores how human breeding and nitrogen have transformed the functional microbiome of plants and soils. Using Zea and Midwestern agriculture as an eco-evolutionary model, we uncover the extent of human impacts on microbiome associations and explore how to “re-wild” these interactions toward more sustainable nitrogen cycling outcomes. We conclude that reframing agriculture as an ecological and evolutionary entity opens the door to transferable knowledge for building resilient food systems and understanding microbial ecology.

Alonso Favela is an Assistant Professor in the School of Plant Sciences at UA. He grew up in Arizona but is the son of rural peasant farmers from Durango, Mexico. Alonso earned his B.S. from our own department. He received an NSF Graduate Research Fellowship to pursue his Ph.D. in Ecology, Evolution, and Conservation Biology at the University of Illinois at Urbana–Champaign, working with Angela Kent and Martin Bohn. Following his doctoral work, he completed an NSF Rules of Life Postdoctoral Research Fellowship with Steve Allison at UC Irvine, where he investigated how climate change reshapes microbial trait succession in the plant-associated rhizosphere.
Alonso’s research seeks to uncover the mechanistic interactions between plants, their microbiomes, and ecosystem processes through the lens of human transformation and adaptation. He believes that understanding these interactions is essential for developing sustainable agricultural systems and mitigating the impacts of climate change and views Arizona as the ideal setting to tackle these pressing questions.


[The University of Arizona block 'A' logo.]
A. Elizabeth Arnold, PhD

Interim Director and Professor, School of Plant Sciences

Curator, Gilbertson Mycological Herbarium

Chair and Director of Graduate Studies,

Ecosystem Genomics GIDP

THE UNIVERSITY OF ARIZONA

fungi at arizona.edu

www.arnoldlab.net<http://www.arnoldlab.net> | www.gilbertsonherbarium.net<http://www.gilbertsonherbarium.net>


To schedule a meeting, please use https://calendly.com/fungi-arizona


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