Project description
Soil microbial communities perform a multitude of ecosystem functions in the soil ecosystem (Crowther et al. 2019). Quantifying the functional potential of microbial communities is useful for studying microbially mediated ecosystem processes such as carbon (Trivedi et al. 2016) and nitrogen cycling (Zhang et al. 2013), how they respond to environmental and ecosystem change, and can improve the accuracy of ecosystem modelling (Graham et al. 2016).
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 would like to assess the effect of our PFG removal experiment and climate on the functional potential of soil microbial communities. There are various ways of doing this and we are looking into what method is most appropriate and feasible, e.g. by using quantitative PCR or microarray technology. Depending on the method used for quantifying functional potential, this MSc project can involve working in a molecular lab. As you will have access to a lot of data (Vandvik et al. 2022) in addition to that on microbial functionality, the project offers an opportunity to dive into statistical analyses and modelling.
Supervisors
Peter Groth Farsund (peter.farsund@uib.no) and
Vigdis Vandvik (vigdis.vandvik@uib.no)
References
Crowther, T. W., J. van den Hoogen, J. Wan, M. A. Mayes, A. D. Keiser, L. Mo, C. Averill, and D. S. Maynard. 2019. The global soil community and its influence on biogeochemistry. Science 365:eaav0550.
Graham, E. B., J. E. Knelman, A. Schindlbacher, S. Siciliano, M. Breulmann, A. Yannarell, J. M. Beman, G. Abell, L. Philippot, J. Prosser, A. Foulquier, J. C. Yuste, H. C. Glanville, D. L. Jones, R. Angel, J. Salminen, R. J. Newton, H. Bürgmann, L. J. Ingram, U. Hamer, H. M. P. Siljanen, K. Peltoniemi, K. Potthast, L. Bañeras, M. Hartmann, S. Banerjee, R.-Q. Yu, G. Nogaro, A. Richter, M. Koranda, S. C. Castle, M. Goberna, B. Song, A. Chatterjee, O. C. Nunes, A. R. Lopes, Y. Cao, A. Kaisermann, S. Hallin, M. S. Strickland, J. Garcia-Pausas, J. Barba, H. Kang, K. Isobe, S. Papaspyrou, R. Pastorelli, A. Lagomarsino, E. S. Lindström, N. Basiliko, and D. R. Nemergut. 2016. Microbes as Engines of Ecosystem Function: When Does Community Structure Enhance Predictions of Ecosystem Processes? Frontiers in Microbiology 7.
Trivedi, P., M. Delgado-Baquerizo, C. Trivedi, H. Hu, I. C. Anderson, T. C. Jeffries, J. Zhou, and B. K. Singh. 2016. Microbial regulation of the soil carbon cycle: evidence from gene–enzyme relationships. The ISME Journal 10:2593-2604.
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.
Zhang, X., W. Liu, M. Schloter, G. Zhang, Q. Chen, J. Huang, L. Li, J. J. Elser, and X. Han. 2013. Response of the Abundance of Key Soil Microbial Nitrogen-Cycling Genes to Multi-Factorial Global Changes. PLOS ONE 8:e76500.