Biocrust workshop for middle schoolers

Mishler Lab grad students Jenna & Ixchel led a bryophyte and biological soil crust (biocrust) workshop at Expanding Your Horizons; a Bay Area STEM conference for girls in middle-school. The girls learned about function and importance of biocrusts as communities as well as how to identify major organismal groups: lichens, bryophytes, and cyanobacteria. They then experimented with different biocrust samples to test the hypothesis that increasing functional group diversity increases aggregate stability. A success! For more details and photos, check out this blog.