Caitlin Hodges, Soil Scientist

In all scientists is a crappy little writing elf waiting to be unleashed for a first draft. Mine is nocturnal and works best between 9pm and 2am

Arctic Rivers Trade Inorganic Nitrogen for Organic - Eos Climate change is shifting the makeup of a key nutrient in rivers across Russia, Alaska, and Canada, with the potential for ecosystem-wide impacts.

How do you take your nitrogen? In Arctic rivers, the answer is, increasingly, “organic.”

New #AGUPubs research from @nyutandon.bsky.social, @carnegiescience.bsky.social

A silvery checkerspot butterfly relaxing on a Maximillian sunflower leaf

Some checkerspot caterpillars munching on a Maximillian sunflower leaf in May

A beautiful silvery checkerspot butterfly hanging out in my garden today! Earlier in the season there were a ton of checkerspot caterpillars chowing down on my Maximillian sunflowers (a preferred host plant for the checkerspots).The joys of a native garden! 🌻

A soil scientist’s day at the beach

I’m excited to share this publication, based on the research of my first MS student, Jacob Clements! He conducted a very fun experiment that examined the effect of different soil moisture and wetting patterns on nitrate and phosphate biogeochemistry in riparian soils

urldefense.com/v3/__https:/...

And they wonder why yields are so low… my brother in Christ, there is no soil left, you’re growing wheat in 400 million year old weathered sandstone. No amount of fertilizer and roundup can make up for the catastrophic loss of soil that’s happened over the past 120 years in Oklahoma

What the Grapes of Wrath… drove through a little dust storm this week in southwest OK.

I’m perpetually shocked that there are still land managers in OK that allow fallow land to sit uncovered and unvegetated for a growing season.

Waiting for roadside assistance to help with a nail in the field truck tire is not ideal. However, the long wait gives plenty of opportunity for a research update!

This past month we built 24 rainfall exclusion shelters for our USDA-funded project to study the effects of drought, fertilizer, and hay harvest on soil biogeochemistry and plant community composition! I’m super proud of the team for the hard work!

Yes, I agree that it is an annoying angle to use for an argument

What a delightful and wild race to attend for the first time in person!

To be fair, a lot of race commentators also pull the ‘think of the children’ line. It was one of the (bullshit) arguments some used to support the cursing penalties

It drives me crazy that they always fall out of sync! One would think a producer would tell Alex Jacques to cool it with the improv

a man in a suit sitting at a table with the words he admit it written below him ALT: a man in a suit sitting at a table with the words he admit it written below him

Well Hitler’s Naziism was ripped from the American playbook… so maybe Nazis at the space agency were the true Americans?

I totally agree that this is a poor design that could be improved. My students always have a difficult time interpreting the diagram

What is also confusing is that clay can refer to the smallest particles of soil, but also a certain kind of mineral that can be any size 🤷‍♀️

Soil scientists like to make things as confusing as possible, lol

Clay is only represented by the horizontal lines going from the left side of the triangle to the right. Silt is only shown with the lines angled down from the right side of the triangle to the left. Percent sand is only shown with the lines angled up to the left from the bottom of the triangle.

The percent sand silt and clay can only ever sum to 100%. The trick with the triangle is the angle of the lines.

Hi! This showed up on my soil feed, and I’m a PhD in soil science (with this texture triangle tattooed on my arm), so I thought I would try to answer. The soil textures are names we give for certain mixtures of the of particle sizes. The particle sizes are sand=big, silt=medium, clay=small.

Screenshot of abstract and plain language summary of the manuscript

New publication out on the transformation of ferrihydrite in salty systems, with implications for our understanding of iron oxides on Mars! In @agu.org JGR Planets

onlinelibrary.wiley.com/share/author...

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Max like

The sky at midday in Norman OK during a dust storm.

Can confirm, it was very dusty out. This is a picture from my backyard in Norman, OK at midday

Academic mentees thrive in big groups, but survive in small groups - Nature Human Behaviour Using longitudinal genealogical data on mentor–mentee relations and their publications, the authors find that mentees trained in larger groups tend to exhibit superior academic performance compared wi...

Lower survival rate among trainees in labs with highly productive mentors raises important concerns about what we value in academia. Many interesting things to stew over with this paper!

www.nature.com/articles/s41...

Nature exposure induces analgesic effects by acting on nociception-related neural processing - Nature Communications Virtual nature exposure reduces self-reported pain and is associated with decreased brain responses linked to somatosensory and nociceptive processing, providing new insights into the underlying mecha...

Even just looking at images of nature changes our brain and can reduce physical pain, a new study by @maxsteininger.bsky.social and colleagues finds!

This is a cartogram map of the United States depicting land use by different categories. The map distorts state shapes to represent proportional land usage. Key land use types include cow pasture/range (covering much of the central U.S.), private and federal timberland in the Pacific Northwest, corporate timberland in the Southeast, and urban housing/commercial areas in the Northeast. Other categories include agriculture (livestock feed, wheat exports, ethanol/biodiesel, cotton), protected lands (national parks, federal wilderness, state parks), and infrastructure (railroads, airports, highways). Additional specialized land uses include wildfires, golf courses, Christmas tree farms, and maple syrup production.

I think about this map a lot.

www.bloomberg.com/graphics/201...

We are looking for two postdocs for a synthesis project focused on soil carbon dynamics and warming experiments. If you are excited about applying ML and process-based models to synthesize mechanisms of temperature sensitivity of soil respiration, please apply!
lnkd.in/dV2wuGSe
lnkd.in/diZiM9HV

About our agency NOAA is an agency that enriches life through science. Our reach goes from the surface of the sun to the depths of the ocean floor as we work to keep the public informed of the changing environment aro...

“Why do I need NOAA? I’ve got a weather app.”

Is equivalent to asking

“Why do I need farms? I can go to the supermarket.”

www.noaa.gov/about-our-ag...

There Is Basically One Point to Space Exploration. Right Now, We’re Missing It. Efforts to scrub DEI from NASA's websites get it all wrong.

I wrote about NASA, its people and the mission to connect us.
slate.com/technology/2...

We R so back

#Rstats

I guess a lot of published research in soil science, including my whole PhD, was based on measurements that are technically impossible 🤷‍♀️

I’m sorry this happened to you! I also would have been furious.