Professor Alastair H Fitter, CBE, FRS
Emeritus Professor

Research

Overview

The lab's work focuses on plant and microbial behaviour in a changing world, including belowground ecology and functional ecology of roots and mycorrhizal symbioses; carbon cycling in soil especially in relation to mycorrhizas; phenological responses to climate change.

Discoveries

Mycorrhizal fungi exhibit great functional diversity with the greatest selection pressures acting on the external mycelium in soil, rather than on the mycelium that interacts with the plant within the root. Consequently, the management and conservation of these key soil microbes requires an understanding of their fundamental ecology.

Projects

• The diversity of natural communities of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi: niche or neutral model? (Funding body: NERC)
• Mycorrhizal community dynamics under elevated CO2 (Funding body: BBSRC)
• Ecological Flora Project ( Funding body: BES)

Research group(s)