Droevendaalsesteeg 10
6708 PB Wageningen
The Netherlands
Passionate microbial ecologist dedicated to sustainable agriculture. I steer microbial communities for sustainability and efficient nutrient cycling. On my PhD I will focus on mitigating N losses via crop selection for biological nitrification inhibition.
I'm a Bachelor in Environmental Sciences from the Federal University of the State of Rio de Janeiro (UNIRIO) and Master in Sciences from the Graduate Program in Sciences at the Center for Nuclear Energy in Agriculture (CENA) of the University of São Paulo (USP), with a specialized focus on Agriculture and Environment Biology. During my master's program, I conducted research projects that centered on analyzing the microbiome associated with plants of the Urochloa genus (Syn. Brachiaria) and explored methods to improve Phosphorus availability in tropical soils.
Throughout my academic journey, I actively collaborated on diverse research projects across different Brazilian biomes, including the Atlantic Forest, Cerrado (Brazilian savanna), and the Amazon. My experience includes bioinformatics and molecular biology, with emphasis on soil microbiome analysis and microbial ecology.
Currently, I am pursuing a PhD in the Microbial Ecology department at the Netherlands Institute of Ecology (NIOO-KNAW), where my research focuses on mitigating greenhouse gas emissions, with a particular interest in addressing the challenge of reducing N2O emissions through crop selection to promote biological nitrification inhibition. My commitment to advancing sustainable agriculture through microbial ecology and molecular biology continues to drive my academic and research goals.
The global atmospheric concentration of the potent greenhouse gas methane (CH4) is rising rapidly, and agriculture is responsible for 30%-50% of the yearly CH4 emissions. To limit its global warming effects, strong and sustained reductions are needed. Sustainable agricultural management strategies, as the use of organic amendments like compost, have previously proven to have a potent CH4 mitigation effect in laboratory experiments. Here we investigated, using an extensive field study, the effect of organic amendments on the CH4 mitigation potential and CH4 cycling microbial communities of arable soils. Organic-amended soils had higher potential CH4 uptake rates and an improved potential to oxidize CH4 to sub-atmospheric concentrations. Also, we showed for the first time that the methanotrophic and methanogenic microbial communities of arable soils were unequivocally altered after organic amendment application by increasing in size while getting less diverse. Compost-amended soils became dominated by the compost-originating methanotroph Methylocaldum szegediense and methanogen Methanosarcina horonobensis, replacing the indigenous methane cycling community members. However, multivariate analyses didn't point out type Ib methanotrophs like M. szegediense as significant driving factors for the observed improved soil CH4 uptake potential. Conventional type IIa methanotrophs like Methylocystis sp. also had higher differential abundances in organic-amended soils and are speculated to contribute to the improved CH4 uptake potential. Altogether, the results showed that compost serves as a vector for the introduction of CH4 cycling microbes and improves the soil's CH4 uptake potential, which emphasizes the potential of organic fertilization with compost to contribute to CH4 mitigation in agricultural soils.