An environmental studies major and gifted artist, Saxony Charlot is passionate about raising awareness for �Ჹ�ɲ���ʻ��’s endangered and threatened species. As she pursues her scientific studies at the , her stunning artwork is flourishing.

“Hawaiian ecosystems are my passion,” she said. “It’s always just called to me. Since I was a kid, I’ve had a keen interest in �Ჹ�ɲ���ʻ��’s native species and their conservation.”

This is reflected in two images of the week that she has contributed to UH News.

Family legacy

Charlot was born and raised on Oʻahu and grew up on a small family farm in Waimānalo to a family of artists. She is the great-granddaughter of Jean Charlot, a renowned and painter, who also created murals for UH Mānoa and Leeward Theatre.

Both her great-grandfather and her grandfather, Martin, have been artistic inspirations for the young protégé throughout her life, and this background effortlessly melded with her love of conservation.

“I’ve been blessed to have had the opportunity to work and volunteer with numerous conservation projects on Oʻahu, �鶹��ý Island, and in Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument,” she wrote in . “My field experience includes managing a native plant nursery, tagging Hawaiian monk seals, disentangling wild seabirds, surveying endangered honeycreepers, and more; I also have lab experience in micropropagation of rare plants and bioacoustics projects with native birds.”

The science

Currently, Charlot conducts research at the , at UH Hilo, where the calls of native birds and other bioacoustics are analyzed using a variety of cutting-edge software.

One program she works with is BirdNET, a bioacoustics program developed by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, which uses a neural network that can be trained to recognize bird calls. This helps conservation scientists in the wild by making the process of recognizing bird calls simpler and less time-consuming.

Charlot helps train the neural network by annotating native Hawaiian bird calls by hand using the bioacoustic software program Raven.

Patrick Hart, UH Hilo professor of biology and founder of LOHE Lab, said Charlot’s skills and patience as an artist make her exceptional at software work.

“Her work is contributing to the training of algorithms that will allow us to automatically detect these calls from future recordings,” Hart said.

The art

Precision and attention to detail aren’t the only things that Charlot’s lab work and art have in common. Her artwork primarily depicts native Hawaiian species, and her passion for species restoration and Hawaiian ecosystems greatly influences the subject matter. She works mainly with alcohol markers in pen and ink, but often uses acrylics, gel pens and color pencil for highlighting and detail.

One of her works, Ōu on ʻIeʻie, depicts the relationship between the now extinct native Hawaiian bird, the oʻu, and a native plant, the ʻieʻie, on which the oʻu fed. In 2022, the piece was featured in the prestigious �鶹��ý Nei Art Exhibition, which is held annually at the Wailoa Center in Hilo and sponsored by several state and local conservation groups.

Charlot believes highlighting ecological relationships between species helps create a greater awareness of Hawaiian ecosystems and their diversity.

“A lot of our species are endangered, and a lot are extinct, and so people might not [know] about those kinds of relationships,” she said. “My goal is to raise awareness of �Ჹ�ɲ���ʻ��’s ecology and native species, and I’d like to help people appreciate species that they won’t encounter day-to-day.”

Portions of the proceeds from art she sells go directly to conservation groups to help support species and ecosystem revitalization.

Charlot’s art is featured on her website and on , where she posts the pictures along with a short write-up about each species.

The art of science

Charlot’s aspirations for the future are still mostly lab and fieldwork based, but she acknowledges that her art plays a large role in her conservation practice and her life.

“The art is kind of an aside that pulls it all together in my life,” she said.

“It’s funny, the art has made me realize that reaching people is really important in conservation work. For years I thought I just wanted to do things in the field, but, after doing fieldwork for so long, I realized that reaching other people in the community has maybe even a bigger impact.”

—By Evangeline Lemieux, who is double majoring in English and medical anthropology at UH Hilo

To study the effect of fungal-bacterial interactions on nutrients such as carbon and nitrogen in soil, a three-year $3.4 million grant was awarded by the U.S. Department of Energy to an interdisciplinary team headed by University of �鶹��ý at Mānoa Associate Professor Nhu Nguyen.

A single teaspoon of soil contains billions of bacteria from thousands of bacterial species, interacting with kilometers of fungal hyphae (hyphae are the long filamentous branches that make up the body of a fungus), which release digestive enzymes in order to absorb nutrients from food sources. These microorganisms are the machinery that drive important elemental cycles such as carbon and nitrogen on the planet. Researchers don’t quite know how these microbial interactions behave across different soils.

�鶹��ý’s vast diversity of soils accounts for more than 80% of soil types on the planet, making it the perfect environment to study these dominant members of the soil microbiome.

“Because of our island topology and small landmass, we can control for environmental factors, including climate and host plants, that can influence the soil microbiome,” said Nguyen. “The diversity of soils in �鶹��ý plays a central role. In other words, this work can only be done in �鶹��ý, and because each of our soils is representative of those found in larger continental landmasses, our findings would be translatable to other soils across the world.”

Nguyen and UH Mānoa soil scientists Jonathan Deenik and Tai Maaz have partnered with Maggie Yuan of University of California, Berkeley, Jizhong Zhou of University of Oklahoma and Jennifer Pett-Ridge of the Lawrence Livermore National Laboratory. The team is hoping to find out if fungal-bacterial interactions can change whether carbon and nitrogen molecules are kept sequestered underground or if they are released into the atmosphere, contributing to climate change.

“The soil holds more carbon than all aboveground biomass and atmosphere combined, and soil microbes cycle the available nitrogen that sustains much of terrestrial life,” said Nguyen. “Whether these molecules are contributing to climate change is likely connected to the interactions among the millions of species of fungi and bacteria that live there.”

“I am very excited to be working with a fantastic team to figure out how interactions among members of the soil microbiome can determine the fate of molecules that warm the planet,” Nguyen added. “As these molecules flow through microbes in the soil, they can be captured by plants and thus help provide pathways toward sustainable agriculture—a system that both provides food and keeps carbon and harmful nitrogen molecules from leaving the soil.”

The science behind it

Nguyen explained that due to the extremely complex nature of soil, the researchers will leverage tools they developed over the last decade, using stable-isotopes to trace carbon and nitrogen molecules as they move from atmosphere, into plants, into microbial cells, and eventually onto soil mineral surfaces, where they can be stabilized or released back into the atmosphere.

The strength of the project lies in combining stable isotopes with multi-omics tools (metagenomics—the study of genetic material recovered directly from environmental samples, metatranscriptomics—the science that studies gene expression of microbes within natural environments, and metabolomics—the large-scale study of small molecules) and pulling all of these data streams together into a microbially informed ecosystem model.

This systems biology approach, scaling from molecule to organism to ecosystem, is fundamental to understanding the complexity of processes that happen within the soils and translating them to meaningful outcomes, such as mitigating climate change and supporting sustainable agriculture.

This work will contribute to an ongoing initiative at UH to study the microbiome of natural and human-associated environments.