KU doctoral student receives Cobell Fellowship

LAWRENCE — Annalise Guthrie, a University of Kansas doctoral candidate in ecology & evolutionary biology, has been named a recipient of the Elouise Cobell Dissertation Writing-Year Fellowship. The award provides $30,000 in support over 12 months to American Indian and Alaska Native scholars who are completing their doctoral dissertations. 

Guthrie is one of ten 2026 fellowship recipients from across the United States. She is an enrolled citizen of Cherokee Nation, a National Science Foundation Graduate Research Fellow and a member of AISES (Advancing Indigenous Science and Engineering Society). She is a graduate of Haskell Indian Nations University and is from Kansas City, Missouri.

Her dissertation, “Roots of change: Drivers of soil water availability and Critical Zone processes amidst climate and land use changes,” focuses on soil biogeochemical processes and how water movement influences carbon storage and ecosystem functioning.

“I’m looking broadly at how land use change and climate change influence what water carries through soils, particularly organic carbon; how those flows reshape deep soil structure; and ultimately how ecosystem productivity and carbon storage are affected,” Guthrie said.

The Critical Zone is defined as the area from beneath the deepest groundwater to the treetops, the life-supporting area where water, rock, soil, air and organisms interact.

Guthrie has synthesized data from more than 4,000 sites across the U.S. to see how deep soil has changed — for example, as native soils have been changed for agricultural use, then shifted to being postagricultural or regenerating sites. From 2020 through 2024, she collected deep soil samples every two weeks at three sites with different land uses: at Konza Prairie Biological Station near Manhattan; at a site in Ottawa; and at the KU Field Station’s Anderson County Prairie Preserve near Welda.

Currently she is tracking concentrations of soil organic carbon over time, studying how it moves through water.

“How soil structure changes with land use changes is very telling for soil carbon storage,” she said.

Guthrie’s adviser and dissertation committee chair is Sharon Billings, University Distinguished Professor of Ecology & Evolutionary Biology and a senior scientist at the Kansas Biological Survey & Center for Ecological Research, a KU designated research center. 

“Annalise’s work is revealing the extent to which humans are unintentionally altering the physical structure of soil deep in the subsurface,” Billings said.

“Her research shows the impacts of those changes on solute flows throughout soil profiles and how ecosystem productivity increasingly relies on the physical structure of the landscape to capture and retain moisture in a rapidly changing climate. Her discoveries are helping to shape our understanding of ecosystem functioning in the future.”

Cobell Fellowship recipients are expected to demonstrate a commitment to advancing their chosen fields and a strong potential for future contributions as scholars and leaders — and to use Indigenous research methodologies to enrich their academic disciplines and benefit their tribal communities.

Guthrie wants to use her research to provide information useful to Tribal Nations.

“I plan to contextualize my findings so that they can use what I’ve learned to reinforce the capacity they have to grow their own food, to know what’s in their water, to manage the societal changes, and the environmental and social changes, that come with land use change and often hit Tribal Nations the hardest,” she said.