Bio
Eldor Paul is a Research Scientist at the Natural Recourses Ecology Laboratory (NREL) Colorado State University, Ft Collins CO and Professor Emeritus at Michigan State University. He has had a lifelong interest in Soil Microbiology and Biochemistry as well as having extensive teaching, outreach and administrative experience. His textbook on Soil Microbiology and Biochemistry, coauthored with F. E. Clark, is widely read in ecosystem science, agronomy and soil science and has been translated into three other languages. Research interests, as shown by his >250 publications, have centered on the ecology of soil biota, the role of nutrients such as N in plant growth and the dynamics of C and N in sustainable agriculture and global change. Work on microbial ecology has involved the use of molecular techniques to investigate the presence and the role of nitrifiers and lignin-degrading fungi in long-term ecological research plots. Early work in soil organic matter dynamics involved the development of fractionation techniques together with carbon dating to measure the mean residence time of in situ soil organic matter and its fractions. Other tracers such as 13C and 14C have been used, together with bioassays, to measure the dynamics of the active and slow pools of soil organic matter that are associated with the more resistant material. The potential for carbon sequestration and nitrogen accumulation has been investigated in long-term agroecological systems in the Corn Belt and prairie and afforested soils.
