Seminar Summary - The Evans Lab studies microbial ecology and global change. We ask questions about how microbes respond to stressors like climate change, particularly drought and floods, and land use change like agricultural intensification. How microbes respond can affect a myriad of ecosystem services, including soil fertility and crop growth, and biogeochemical cycles. In this talk I highlight studies in our lab that span microscopic to global. First, I'll talk about how (and whether) we can generalize microbial responses to a global change, like drought. We used a network of rainout shelters to ask whether there were taxonomic or trait-based shifts in microbes under drought, worldwide. We also extend this work to thinking about how microbes interact with plants to buffer plants under drought. Second, I'll talk about a project investigating bacteria that fix nitrogen, and how they interact with both the plant and other organisms in the soil, like fungi. We hypothesized that bacterial-fungal interactions increased nitrogen fixation, benefitting the plant, and potentially reducing reliance on nitrogen fertilizers. I will also talk more generally about how these topics connect to global sustainability, and relevant research at the Kellogg Biological Station Long Term Ecological Research Site.