Meet Fabrizzio Protti (ESR5)

Hello! My name is Fabrizzio Protti Sánchez and I come from Costa Rica where I did my bachelor’s in Biology at Universidad Nacional (UNA). I started my scientific adventure and got interested in biogeochemistry and climate change impacts on ecosystem processes while working as a student research assistant in a project on carbon effluxes in the stunning (but full of blood-sucking mosquitoes) tropical dry forest at Palo Verde National Park in Costa Rica.

After my undergraduate studies, I did a year internship at the Smithsonian Tropical Research Institute in Panama. There, I worked in a long-term monitoring project studying spatial and temporal variability on soil and stem CO₂ effluxes on Barro Colorado Island. This experience was a tipping point in life, where I got the chance to interact with a great international scientific community and got more familiar with ecosystem carbon fluxes. This further motivated me to study abroad and I moved to Germany to do my master’s studies in the program Global Change Ecology at the University of Bayreuth.

For my master thesis, I studied the individual impact of root exudate components on the mineralization of SOC (‘Priming effect’) in temperate forests in Germany. For that, I executed a laboratory incubation experiment with repeated additions of isotopically-labelled C substrates (¹³C) mimicking root exudates, and I examined soil microbial responses by analysing soil CO₂ production, priming effect, activities of hydrolytic exoenzymes, microbial biomass and soil mineral N. I did my master thesis at the Max Planck Institute for Biogeochemistry in Jena, Germany and within the Biodiversity Exploratories Framework.

Now as a PhD student (ESR 5) at the University of Innsbruck (Austria) for the FutureArctic, I will study temporal dynamics in soil CO₂ emissions in sub-arctic grasslands that have been exposed to chronic warming in a geothermal gradient in Iceland. I will separate the sources of soil CO₂ production into heterotrophic, autotrophic, and geogenic components, and analyse their seasonal variability and their individual and combined responses to warming. However, due to the corona crisis, the fieldwork this summer seems complicated, thus we are planning of doing a laboratory incubation experiment. More details will come soon 😉

I am very happy and excited to be part of the FutureArctic and I am looking forward to working together and collaborating with all the scientists involved in this project and improving our understanding of how terrestrial ecosystems, and in this case (sub)arctic grasslands, will respond under future climate conditions.

Pura Vida!

Fabrizzio