Dror Minz, Ph.D

I study plant-soil feedback in communities of wild plants in Israel. In my experiments, I establish artificial or semi-artificial plant communities that grow directly in the soil or in large containers. I use these experiments to understand what affects the species composition of plant communities and soil microbiome communities, and how they interact with each other. The experiments include different stressors that represent the effects of human behavior on natural grasslands - over-nitrification of the soil and removal of the above-ground plant biomass seasonally. These will allow us to test how we as humans indirectly shape the natural plant communities in our environment, and how eventually, it is the unseen underground microbiome that facilitates many of these processes. Field work is done at the experimental farm of the Faculty of Agriculture in Rehovot, and at an LTER station in the south of Israel. The research is co-supervised by Dr. Niv DeMalach in the plant ecology aspect (HUJI), and Dr. Dror Minz in the soil microbiome aspect (ARO).