Extraordinary Students Doing Extraordinary Research - Vanessa Siemens

In this episode, host Peter Frohlich, research development coordinator with the National Centre for Livestock and the Environment (NCLE) talks with Entomology student Vanessa Siemens about her research into soil health.

Transcript

Peter Frohlich: 0:11

Hello and welcome to the Extraordinary Students Doing Extraordinary Research podcasts. This podcast explores how students at the University of Manitoba are contributing to research that enhances the sustainability of food production in the province and beyond. My name is Peter Frohlich. I am the Research Development Coordinator for the National Centre for Livestock and the Environment, located right here at the University of Manitoba. Today I am joined by Vanessa Siemens, who is working on her Master of Science degree in Entomology. Vanessa is also one of several students who are recipients of research funding through the RBC's Scholars in Sustainable Agriculture program. This program, in its second year at the University, provides opportunities for students to carry out research and receive hands-on training at the University of Manitoba's state-of-the-art livestock and cropping facilities. These include facilities on campus, the Glenlee Research Station, the Ian and Morrison Research Farm in Carmen, and others. I must also add, Vanessa is working with Dr. Kyle Bobiwash, Assistant Professor and Indigenous Scholar from the Department of Entomology, and Dr. Yvonne Lawley, who is an Associate Professor at the Department of Plant Science. Welcome Vanessa. Before we discuss entomology and arthropods and soil health and bioindicators, please tell us a little bit about yourself and why you chose this area of study.

Vanessa Siemens: 1:21

Hi Peter. My name is Vanessa and I am actually coming here as a transfer student from the Lower Mainland, from Vancouver. And so how I got interested in this area of study, or particularly in entomology, is kind of a bit of a winding road. I grew up in the suburbs of Vancouver and my parents had a decent-sized property with a ravine in the backyard, and at the middle of that ravine had a salmon spawning creek. And so me and my brother spent lots of time just exploring that little bit of forest that we had, and looking at like small things, and the moss, and the bugs, and the baby salmon, and feeding salmon salmonberries and such. And then when I grew up and started working, I completely went away from science and animals, and I started in the trades. And so I just kind of forgot about nature for a little bit. And so when it was time for me to stop that job, I really wanted to do something that would bring me outside and getting me working with plants and animals. But to be practical, and found myself looking at agriculture, growing food has always been an interest of mine, having a better relationship with plants. So I started looking at universities that were teaching agricultural programs. And the one thing that highlighted the University of Manitoba for me was the fact that it had an entomology department, and it actually is the only entomology department across Canada. And so that was very exciting for me, because at the time I had started to become a beekeeper. So I had done a couple summers working with beekeepers in my local area and just fell in love with it. Honeybees are actually really, really fun to work with. Like once you get over the fear of being stung every day, because I did get stung at least once every day. My favourite part was being able to put my hands right into this hive and just be covered in hundreds of little insects and watching them move and just be very happy and calm. It was a lovely experience. And so when I first came here, I studied agriculture, I took my agronomy degree, and I started to get involved with the entomology departments, like in volunteering and stuff. And I still really love bees. They opened up my eyes to the fact that there are hundreds of native bees that have nothing to do with honeybees or bumblebees, because when I first came here, I definitely was one of those people that thought bees were just bumblebees and honeybees, and their importance in pollination and crop production and all of that. The other thing that really struck me very largely was my first soils class here at U ofM. I did not realize how much that soils was a living system. And at the time, I had been going through some health issues. And so the human gut and human gut microbiome was at the forefront of my interest. And then learning about the soils, I really realized like how important the life within the soils are, that it's not just a medium for plants to grow in, but also that there is this big symbiotic relationship to all the other life forms in that soil, just exactly like we have humans with our gut microbiome. That I don't know if you're aware, but we don't actually eat our food. We feed our microbiome, and then that microbiome digests the food for us, and then we're able to absorb the nutrients from that. And so it was just kind of an aha moment that the soil is kind of the stomach or the gut of the planet, which really fascinated me.

Peter Frohlich: 4:52

This is where we grow our food, and we have to take care of it. And I know there's a lot of research at the university looking at soil health, and this is sort of part of your project, right?

Vanessa Siemens: 5:00

Yeah, definitely. Exactly. So it's about how do we work with that soil to continue to produce crops, and also not only grow crops, but regenerate that soil and to continue to be the natural resource that we can use and continue to grow crops in perpetuity. So I'm working on a project that is monitoring different cover crop combinations and using soil arthropods. And so I'll be using the term arthropods, but like insects are arthropods, but not all arthropods are insects. But that is what is brought to mind, like an insect-like creature with a hard exoskeleton and multiple legs. And so I'll just be using the term arthropods.

Peter Frohlich: 5:42

So cover crops, really quickly, why cover crops?

Vanessa Siemens: 5:45

Why cover crops? Cover crops are a big talking point right now because there's a push for farmers to uptake cover crops. And this is an important step in land management to be able to extend the living root presence in the soil going into the winter. This is an important part of maintaining soil quality, first of all, because it maintains soil structure by helping to be like a rebar in the soil and help hold it there. But then also it continues to feed the life that's in the soil that we were talking about earlier. So plants exude carbohydrates and sugars into the soil that they have produced through photosynthesis, and this helps feed all the different life forms in the soil. And so you're getting that extended food, habitat, water, and safety into the winter to help better prepare that soil life to survive our long winters. And then also coming in spring, they also will now have food to eat once everything has kind of come out of dormancy.

Peter Frohlich: 6:49

Very cool. So tell us a bit more about the arthropods in the soil.

Vanessa Siemens: 6:52

Right. The arthropods that I'm particularly looking at are called springtails. And so we're using them as a biological soil quality indicator. And so there are many different arthropods. You could spend a lifetime just documenting the diversity in soil arthropods. So we will be documenting as many as we can, but the particular interests of springtails are they themselves have a very wide range of niches that they fill. They are both bacteriovores, fungivores, and detritophores, meaning they'll eat dead matter, they'll eat fungi, they'll eat bacteria. They live in the surface litter of plants and also at the soil surface, but then also deeper into the soil. And so they will also be looking different and providing different ecosystem services at different depths with which they live in the soil.

Peter Frohlich: 7:45

I read something about the name springtails. They have a neat adaptation.

Vanessa Siemens: 7:50

Yeah, they're really cool. So you can definitely notice them like you should be able to notice them with your naked eye if you looked closely at the soil surface and the litter there. They are very small, but you'll notice that they jump. And so they have a little structure on the bottom of their belly that's kind of held in place. It's called the furcula. And so when they feel that they're in danger, they'll release that little spring and it causes them to fly up into the air. And they're not very graceful when they jump. They just kind of flick themselves in the air and they kind of just fall however they land. David Attenborough actually has a really cute little like one minute video of a springtail. You can look it up and they just kind of like fall flat on their face. But they're very cute little animals and they come in all ranges of colors and sizes from bright yellow to deep cobalt blue. Some of them are round. They're called globular looking shapes and some are like longer, a little bit more like millipede. They're quite diverse.

Peter Frohlich: 8:49

And the reason they do that, I don't want to dwell on the adaptation, but it is kind of interesting, is to get away from predators.

Vanessa Siemens: 8:56

Yeah, it's mainly used as a predator version. Definitely. And they do have a tendency when they feel something like tremor in the ground or something coming that could be native. They do have a tendency to like group together. So they're kind of like run towards each other or they'll just start springing away. They also live in the leaves, like a higher levels of the plants. And so they kind of just drop to the ground, these kind of things. For producers, what is the important aspect of this research? The important aspect for producers will be to, for one, the projects like larger goals would be to help them be able to decide what cover crop and what cover crop combinations is right for them and for their particular land and context. So just depending on the environmental conditions that they're working with will depend on what plants are appropriate. And looking at the soil life diversity and with springtails is kind of just like a biological check that you're doing right by your soil. If you have a good, robust living part of it, because of what these little guys have a tendency to eat, you can look at them. And if you have a diverse and abundant community of springtails, you can also say that you're going to have a lot of bacterial and fungal activity because without their food source that they're not going to be there. So springtails are a type of bioindicator. How is soil health measured now? Soil health really is measured usually with its physical and chemical properties. The biological properties are a bit newer. We do have mechanisms to measure soil biology, but the main two are physical properties and chemical properties. So physical properties are like your sand, silt, clay content and your chemical properties are like your NPK and your pH. Another physical property is like your bulk density. And so right now with the third one, the soil biology, it's usually measured using a fungal to bacterial ratio, which is very useful. You do want to know what your fungal bacterial ratio is. Like with anything in regards to life in the soil, there is literally hundreds of thousands of different kinds of bacteria and fungi to try to piece out which ones are doing what or which ones are more important is very tedious. And so we're definitely looking at what other things that you can look at in soil biology to make that kind of distinction easier.

Peter Frohlich: 11:20

So this is basically another tool in a toolbox to measure soil health.

Vanessa Siemens: 11:24

Yeah, exactly.

Peter Frohlich: 11:25

So based on your research, when do you think this information will be available for producers or for academics or for those who measure soil?

Vanessa Siemens: 11:33

Well, the research side of things will be completed by the end of next summer, and I will definitely be looking at presenting at conferences going into next spring, like at the UofM Sustainable Agriculture Conference and hopefully the Manitoba Soil Science Society conferences. So I'm hoping by next fall to have more deliverables in terms of publishing.

Peter Frohlich: 11:58

So getting back to the RBC program, what are some of the benefits?

Vanessa Siemens: 12:02

I would have to say that the RBC program has really helped me connect with other academics within the university. And I have been really impressed with the interdisciplinary nature of this project. My original proposal had me doing something almost the exact same, but I would have had to be doing a lot more by myself. And so by working on this project, I am able to connect with the other master's and PhD students in the soils departments and the plant science department, which helps us to have different layers of knowledge at the plant science level, the soil science level and the entomological level. And so this interdisciplinary nature of this project, I think, is very helpful and I think is necessary for young scientists to learn, because I think that is what's going to help us achieve the goal of sustainable agriculture, is learning how to work interdisciplinary and with the stakeholders like the farmers that are actually going to use this information. And so the RBC program itself has definitely helped me to be able to connect with all of those people regularly and start sharing our information.

Peter Frohlich: 13:10

Very cool. Great project. So I have one question, so I'm not related to the research, but for those students in high school, for example, who are considering going into agriculture, what would you tell them?

Vanessa Siemens: 13:22

I would tell them that if they have any inkling at all to go into agriculture, whether it's for a food production perspective or just being closer to the land, to definitely reach out and come into this program. For me, it has been an eye opening for a few different things. I thought I was a pretty good environmentalist and knew a lot, but coming to do it as a formal program was really eye opening and getting to connect with other professionals has been very beneficial. So I would definitely recommend it to any high school student that would be looking to come into agriculture and just explore, because there is definitely more options than you think. That's a great message.

Peter Frohlich: 14:03

Well, thank you, Vanessa. It's been a pleasure to meet you and to hear about your project. We are certainly looking forward to hearing more from UM students about how their work contributes to creating sustainable agriculture systems in Manitoba. And thank you all for listening. Please stay tuned for upcoming podcasts on UM Extraordinary Students doing extraordinary research that enhances the sustainability of agriculture and food production.