Janey Lienau

Janey Lienau is a Master’s of Environmental Science candidate in her first year at the Yale School of Environment. She is co-advised by Drs. Os Schmitz and Marlyse Duguid and focuses her research on understanding how soil food webs are related to nutrient cycling and plant communities. The main goal of her research is to investigate the relationship between soil food web diversity and nitrogen availability and explore how these food webs are responding to nitrogen disturbance from agriculture.

Janey brings her prior research experience from the Soil Ecology lab at The Morton Arboretum in Lisle, Illinois, where she worked from January 2020 through August 2021. During her time at the arboretum, she researched how specific tree species influence soil properties and their relationships to soil food webs under the mentorship of Drs. Meghan Midgley and Robert Buchkowski. She has presented her findings at the Ecology Society of American 2021 annual conference and has a forthcoming publication Evergreen abundance drives ground beetle diversity and density in eastern temperate forests.