Manuel Delgado Baquerizo

Manuel Delgado-Baquerizo is a soil ecologist with a wide range of experience in many fields such as biological soil crust ecology, biogeochemistry, microbial ecology, and ecosystem ecology in general (and dryland ecology in particular).

He obtained his PhD from the Universidad Pablo de Olavide (Spain) in May 2013. During his PhD titled Effects of climate change on soil N dynamics in semi-arid ecosystems at several spatial scales, Dr. Delgado-Baquerizo conducted different laboratory and observation field studies in order to evaluate how global climate (i.e. increasing aridity) together with classical nitrogen (N) cycle drivers, such as abiotic (i.e. soil pH and sand content) and biotic (i.e. plant cover), modulate N dynamics from global to local scale in drylands.

Manuel has extensive experience in traditional soil biogeochemical techniques (e.g. soil C, N and P cycling). He had the chance to learn molecular techniques to study soil microbial communities (i.e. qPCR; pyrosequencing) at Colorado State University (USA), as well as techniques useful for studying microbial functional diversity (such as Microresp). He also has experience in working with structural equation modeling, regression tree analysis and multiple regression models.

Manuel joined the Hawkesbury Institute for the Environment in January 2014. His current interest is in understanding how soil microbial community and biological soil crusts determine soil functionality and stability in response to global change.