The microbial impact of soil carbon and nutrient transformations: scaling and stoichiometry
EMSL Project ID
60152
Abstract
The proposed work is centered around the combination of stable isotope probing (SIP) techniques with high resolution -omics data to resolve the movement of ecologically critical elements (carbon, nitrogen, and phosphorus – C, N, P) at the level of individual microbial taxa. This work will develop and apply new methods to understand the ecology of soil microorganisms using stable isotope tracers and genomics, which when combined offer powerful insights into the cycling of nutrients in the environment and the organisms that take up, use, and recycle those nutrients as they grow and die. This proposal will focus on particular soil microorganisms, bacteria and fungi, that make up the majority of life in soil, and which are responsible for most of the nutrient transformations in soil that are vital to ecosystems, and to people. This project will also evaluate how soil microorganisms and the nutrient cycling processes they catalyze are sensitive to shifts in temperature, a major driver of biological processes. This new suite of techniques will investigate and describe the microbial ecology of nutrient cycling in soil environments. The work relies on four long-term field experiments where temperature-treated and control plots occur in arctic, boreal, temperate, and tropical biomes. Our systems biology approach will interrogate community and taxon-specific microbial controls over key biogeochemical processes in terrestrial environments, and test quantitative ecological and biogeochemical principles using genomics and SIP data, including theories of element limitation, growth efficiency, and nutrient use efficiency. Our work will therefore “form and test hypotheses on underlying ecological principles”, and “facilitate scaling of concepts and data across multiple levels of biological organization”.
Project Details
Start Date
2021-07-22
End Date
2021-09-30
Status
Closed
Released Data Link
Team
Principal Investigator
Co-Investigator(s)
Team Members