Presentations by MMS Graduate Scholarship Recipients

Our June 9th meeting will be shared remotely via Zoom.

2025 marks the 11th year that MMS will award scholarships supporting graduate work in mycology in honor of beloved MMS members James Swanson and Doris Johannes. Stay tuned for more details about this year’s recipients and their work.

Come check out these presentations highlighting their graduate thesis topics!

Speaker 1: Shannon Meehan

Effects of Disturbance History on Ectomycorrhizal Fungi & Tree Seedlings in Reforestation

Shannon is studying how ectomycorrhizal fungal communities can be restored in tandem with tree seedlings to enhance the success of reforestation projects. Forest disturbances can affect mycorrhizal communities, even when these disturbances do not directly impact the soil. Shannon is researching this relationship by planting sterile tree seedlings, and seedlings inoculated with mycorrhizae in sites with different disturbance histories. After 1-2 years of exposure to the native soil communities, she harvests the seedlings and evaluates ectomycorrhizal colonizations and plant growth. The goal of her research is to understand if inoculating tree seedlings with mycorrhizal fungi improves seedling success in reforestation projects and restores mycorrhizal communities at ecologically degraded sites. Results of her research will feed directly into a statewide reforestation project known as MN Million, which is a collaboration of many partners with large-scale reforestation goals. She intends to publish her research in 2026.

Shannon is a 2nd year Masters student in the Integrated Biosciences Program at UMN Duluth. Prior to graduate school, she dedicated 5 years of her career to ecological restoration. During that time, she noticed an alarming tendency to overlook soil communities in standard ecological restoration practices. This failure to consider the critical role of soil-dwelling organisms, like fungi, in restoration projects led her to her current work at UMD with Dr. Julie Etterson. Upon graduating, she aims to return to a career in ecological restoration and advocacy for fungal-focused restoration practices. Understanding that the relationships between fungi, flora, and fauna are interdependent and essential to the health and resilience of all ecosystems, she sees the relationship between amateur and professional mycology as interdependent too!  Promoting relationships between amateur and professional mycologists is a practice she wishes to carry with her as she pursues her own career as an ecologist.

Learn more and get involved:

• Restoring MN forests
• Minnesota’s Climate Smart Seedling Production Network
• Farm & Forest Cooperative
• Forest & climate research happening at UMD

Speaker 2: Gregory Harris

Morticulture and the role of wood-decaying fungi in snag dynamics

Standing dead trees, commonly called snags, play an important role in forest ecosystem functions. Snags provide structural habitat for a host of vertebrate and invertebrate species. Snags also serve as a substrate and energy source for microbial organisms, primarily fungi, who are the foundational species of a complex detrital food web and ecosystem that develop within a decaying snag. As such, snags also help regulate the forest carbon budget and nutrient cycles.

Morticulture is a developing set of forestry practices aimed at mitigating the loss of dead wood, both snags and down woody debris, in managed forests. Forest management practices traditionally have reduced, both intentionally and unintentionally, the dead wood component in forest stands and put at risk the ecological functions and biodiversity that it helps to maintain. Greg’s PhD research has been focused on getting a better understanding of snag dynamics in order to formulate actionable guidelines and operations for forest practitioners to incorporate in their activities so as to promote and conserve the snag resource. His work has been on the Chippewa National Forest in red pine dominated forest stands and at Cedar Creek in oak savannas looking at snag recruitment and loss rates under different management scenarios as well as quantifying changes in morphology and structural integrity of snags as they decay.

Gregory has an undergraduate degree in forestry and geology from The University of the South, Sewanee, Tennessee. After earning it, he worked briefly with the U.S. Forest Service prior to earning a Masters of Forestry from Yale University’s School of Forestry and Environmental Studies. He then practiced forestry and IT before entering the University of Minnesota to work on his doctorate. In his second semester, he took Bob Blanchette’s Forest and Shade Tree Pathology course. It was there that he became fascinated with fungi. Having caught the mycology “bug”, he became a member of MMS and the University’s Mycology Club and started doing personal and group forays. Last summer, he took some preliminary mycology samples during his field research to practice culturing techniques and genetic analysis in the lab, all the while photographing mushrooms throughout the summer field season.

Presentations are recorded and posted a few days later on the MMS YouTube channel.

This meeting is free and open to the public. Members receive Zoom links on meeting announcements and reminders. Also, anyone can click on the button below and provide their contact info to be sent the Zoom link for this meeting.

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