Kusum Naithani Source Confirmed

Affiliation confirmed via AI analysis of OpenAlex, ORCID, and web sources.

Federal Grant PI

Associate Professor

University of Arkansas at Fayetteville

faculty

13 h-index 72 pubs 937 cited

Research Areas

Microbial Community Ecology and Physiology Wildlife Ecology and Conservation Soil and Water Nutrient Dynamics Food Security and Health in Diverse Populations Engineering Education and Pedagogy Diverse Educational Innovations Studies Environmental Science Research and Education

Links

ORCID Lab Website

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OverviewAI-generated summary

Kusum Naithani's research investigates ecological systems, with a focus on environmental science and data utilization. Her work includes studies on greenhouse gas emissions within the food and beverage sector and the recovery of soil microbial diversity following disturbances in tropical montane forests. Naithani also explores the impact of human activities, such as sheep grazing, on insect populations, including wild bees, and examines methods for estimating their foraging ranges for conservation purposes.

Naithani is actively involved in advancing open environmental science through the NEON (National Ecological Observatory Network) data infrastructure. She contributes to building communities that utilize ecological data for research and education, including developing data-wrangling tools like the `neonMicrobe` R package. Her federally funded projects, totaling $878,466 from the National Science Foundation (NSF), support research and education initiatives focused on the assessment and sustainable management of ecosystem services at the nexus of food, energy, and water systems. She has served as Principal Investigator (PI) on one of these grants and Co-PI on another.

With a scholarly record including 72 publications and 937 citations, Naithani's h-index is 13. She collaborates with researchers at the University of Arkansas at Fayetteville, including Megan Reavis, Neelendra K. Joshi, and Ayanna St. Rose, with whom she shares multiple publications.

Metrics

h-index: 13
Publications: 72
Citations: 937

Selected Publications

Modeling rice leaf area index and canopy height in the US Mid‐South region (2025) DOI
Unraveling the Influence of Structural Complexity, Environmental, and Geographic Factors on Multi‐Trophic Biodiversity in Forested Landscapes (2025) DOI
Intertegular Distance of Wild Bees and its Use in Estimating Proboscis Lengths and Foraging Ranges to Better Understand Bee Conservation Ecology (2024) DOI
Sheep grazing influences the abundance, diversity, and community composition of wild bees and other insects in livestock pastures (2024) DOI
A Problem with Distance Variables and Alternatives for Their Use (2024) DOI
Effects of measurement methods and growing conditions on phenotypic expression of photosynthesis in seven diverse rice genotypes (2023) DOI
People, infrastructure, and data: A pathway to an inclusive and diverse ecological network of networks (2022) DOI
Recovery of soil microbial diversity and functions along a tropical montane forest disturbance gradient (2022) DOI
Building communities of teaching practice and data‐driven open education resources with <scp>NEON</scp> faculty mentoring networks (2022) DOI
Evaluating Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Climate Mitigation Goals of the Global Food and Beverage Sector (2022) DOI
Harnessing the NEON data revolution to advance open environmental science with a diverse and data‐capable community (2021) DOI
From DNA sequences to microbial ecology: Wrangling NEON soil microbe data with the <i>neonMicrobe</i> R package (2021) DOI
Evaluating the Landscape of Greenhouse Gas Emissions and Climate Mitigation Goals of the Global Food and Beverage Sector (2021) DOI