Project description
Climate change entails global and local shifts in temperature and precipitation, with consequences for biotic communities in above- and belowground ecosystems (Jansson and Hofmockel 2020). Soil bacteria and fungi are two major groups of microorganisms constituting a large part of the soil microbiome. Both groups include partners and parasites of plants as well as primary decomposers of organic material, central to nutrient cycling and productivity in the soil ecosystem (Philippot et al. 2024). The two groups are also functionally different, e.g. in that bacteria are generally efficient at utilizing high quality resources while fungi are better at breaking down complex molecules of lower nutritional quality. The abundance of the two groups can therefore have implications for ecosystem processes such as carbon cycling (Malik et al. 2016). If we are to predict how climate change may impact the dynamics of these two functionally important groups in the future, we need to understand how they are influenced by climate in the first place.
The FUNDER project aims to assess how climate affects ecosystem functioning above and below ground. The project is carried out across 12 sites in Western Norway spanning four levels of mean annual precipitation and three levels of mean annual summer temperature, forming a climate grid that lets us to investigate direct effects of climate on soil communities. Additionally, we have conducted a fully factorial plant functional group (PFG) removal experiment across the climate grid to assess indirect effects of climate on soil communities via shifts in plant community composition. We have also collected data on abiotic soil properties such as nutrient content and pH (Vandvik et al. 2022), which are also important in influencing soil bacteria and fungi (Siles et al. 2023).
This MSc project will investigate how climate and plant community composition influence the abundance of bacteria and fungi in soil. You will use quantitative polymerase chain reaction (qPCR) to quantify bacteria and fungi in the lab, which will provide you with skills and experience necessary to work in a molecular biology lab. You will also have access to a lot of environmental data to use with the microbial data you generate, and this will let you work with different statistical analyses and modelling.
Supervisors
Peter Groth Farsund (peter.farsund@uib.no) and
Vigdis Vandvik (vigdis.vandvik@uib.no)
References
Jansson, J. K., and K. S. Hofmockel. 2020. Soil microbiomes and climate change. Nature Reviews Microbiology 18:35-46.
Malik, A. A., S. Chowdhury, V. Schlager, A. Oliver, J. Puissant, P. G. M. Vazquez, N. Jehmlich, M. von Bergen, R. I. Griffiths, and G. Gleixner. 2016. Soil Fungal:Bacterial Ratios Are Linked to Altered Carbon Cycling. Frontiers in Microbiology 7.
Philippot, L., C. Chenu, A. Kappler, M. C. Rillig, and N. Fierer. 2024. The interplay between microbial communities and soil properties. Nature Reviews Microbiology 22:226-239.
Siles, J. A., A. Vera, M. Díaz-López, C. García, J. van den Hoogen, T. W. Crowther, N. Eisenhauer, C. Guerra, A. Jones, A. Orgiazzi, M. Delgado-Baquerizo, and F. Bastida. 2023. Land-use- and climate-mediated variations in soil bacterial and fungal biomass across Europe and their driving factors. Geoderma 434:116474.
Vandvik, V., I. H. J. Althuizen, F. Jaroszynska, L. C. Krüger, H. Lee, D. E. Goldberg, K. Klanderud, S. L. Olsen, R. J. Telford, S. A. H. Östman, S. Busca, I. J. Dahle, D. D. Egelkraut, S. R. Geange, R. Gya, J. S. Lynn, E. Meineri, S. Young, and A. H. Halbritter. 2022. The role of plant functional groups mediating climate impacts on carbon and biodiversity of alpine grasslands. Scientific Data 9:451.