Lucia Fuchslueger
SSS Soil System Sciences
The 2021 Division Outstanding Early Career Scientist Award is awarded to Lucia Fuchslueger for her contributions to understanding responses of soil biogeochemical cycling to global change drivers and to unravelling plant and soil microbial interactions and dependence on nutrient availability.
Lucia Fuchslueger is a soil ecologist studying microorganisms, their processes, their interactions with plants and the soil matrix, and their sensitivity to changing nutrient and micro-climatic conditions. In her research, Fuchslueger has pioneered various isotopic approaches as tools to trace the fate of carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus through the plant-soil-microbe continuum and to investigate soil microbial resilience to different global change factors such as elevated CO2, drought, and warming. Throughout her research career at the University of Vienna, Austria, at the National Institute of Amazonian Research in Brazil, and Belgium’s University of Antwerp, Fuchslueger has authored several publications unravelling the role of microbes in soil biogeochemical cycles, as well as their responses to potential climate change aspects across various scales.
Fuchslueger is especially passionate about raising awareness of soil ecology and global change in tropical ecosystems, with the aim of shedding more light on soil biogeochemical dynamics needed to improve projections for such hyper-diverse ecosystems in a changing world. As a dedicated soil ecologist, Fuchslueger is equally involved in fieldwork, developing and applying high-end laboratory techniques, and student training activities.