September 29, 2003

Soil Biodiversity Expert To Give Teale Lecture "Belowground Biodiversity of Hot and Cold Deserts" is the topic of a lecture by soil biodiversity expert Diana Wall, on Thursday, Oct. 9, at 4 p.m. in the Thomas J. Dodd Research Center. Her talk is part of the Edwin Way Teale Lecture Series on Nature and the Environment. Admission is free.

Wall, professor and director of the Natural Resource Ecology Laboratory at Colorado State University, is doing research on the importance of soil biodiversity for both ecosystems and human society. She is investigating how soil biodiversity contributes to productive and healthy soils, and how human activities can influence on soil sustainability.

Her current research looks at how soil warming changes soil biological diversity and ecology in the Antarctic Dry Valleys, the most extreme desert on earth.

"Diana H. Wall is a biologist who is not afraid to get dirty," says Robin Chazdon, a professor of ecology and evolutionary biology at UConn. "Most of what lives in the soil is virtually invisible to us, and her dynamic leadership has resulted in tremendous increases in the visibility of research involving soil biodiversity."

Wall is past president of the Ecological Society of America. She chaired DIVERSITAS International Biodiversity Observation Year in 2002, and currently chairs the Global Litter Invertebrate Decomposition Experiment and the Council of Scientific Society Presidents. She is an advisor to NASA, the National Science Foundation, and the United Nations, and is a fellow and co-chair of the Aldo Leopold Leadership Program, a fellow in the American Association for the Advancement of Science, and a Tom Damman Distinguished Lecturer in Ecology at Kansas State University. She earned her Ph.D. in plant pathology at the University of Kentucky in 1970.