Microbial controls on climate active trace gas cycling in forest soil ecosystems
EMSL Project ID
48865
Abstract
Globally, soils store more than double the C in the planet’s atmosphere, and three times the C in aboveground biomass. This large carbon reservoir, stored as soil organic matter (SOM), can be mobilized by soil microbes and released into the atmosphere as climate active trace gases including carbon dioxide (CO2), methane (CH4) and nitrous oxide (N2O). Indeed, it has been estimated that C release from soils may lead to a doubling in projected increase in global warming over the next 85 years. The long-term ability of soil to incorporate, store and cycle SOM is determined by multiple biotic and abiotic factors. While SOM affects soil nutrient availability, gas exchange6 and soil moisture content, microbial community metabolism actively drives matter and energy transformations underlying climate active trace gas cycling. Moreover, soil microbial community responses to SOM removal are persistent, continuing more than 15 years after initial tree harvesting. Despite persistent impact of soil distubrance on microbial community strucutre, changes in microbial community metabolism remain poorly constrained and no studies have combined real time trace gas flux measurements with cultivation-independent gene expression and metabolite profiling to determine impacts of SOM removal on microbial community function. Our ability to monitor and predict these responses has important implications for global climate forecasts and human adaptation to climate change from both esthetic and resource management perspectives. Here we propose a systems level investigation of microbial controls on climate active trace gas cycling including CO2, CH4 and N2O in forest soil ecosystems integrated within the Long-Term Soil Productivity (LTSP) study. Over 110 LTSP sites traverse North American ecozones from Canada to the southern United States forming one of the world's largest coordinated research networks addressing forest management and sustained productivity science. This work, integrated within the LTSP study will build directly on previous community composition and metagenome analyses conducted by our research team. Here, we will use gene expression studies spanning multiple levels of biological information (RNA, protein, and metabolites) in combination with process rate and surficial flux chamber measurements to link climate active trace gas cycling to specific environmental conditions and microbial community interaction networks across six ecozones. We will constrain how metabolic pathways and trophic interactions respond to SOM removal and link this response to climate active trace gas production and consumption. Outcomes of this research will be used to construct environmental pathway/genome databases and process-based reactive transport models with multi-scale resolution. EMSL resources are needed to conduct the multi-omic measurements described above and to process and compare resulting datasets. Concomitant with these fundamental research efforts we will develop new visualization and sequence clustering algorithms supporting interactive analysis across multiple levels of biological information in collaboration with EMSL through an extant partner proposal
Project Details
Project type
Large-Scale EMSL Research
Start Date
2015-10-01
End Date
2017-09-30
Status
Closed
Released Data Link
Team
Principal Investigator
Team Members