Microbial landscapes: Are microorganisms hidden drivers of species distributions?

微生物景观：微生物是物种分布的隐藏驱动力吗？

• 批准号: 1922521
• 负责人: Michelle Afkhami
• 金额: $ 85.12万
• 依托单位: University of Miami
• 依托单位国家: 美国
• 项目类别: Standard Grant
• 财政年份: 2019
• 资助国家: 美国
• 起止时间: 2019-07-01 至 2024-06-30
• 项目状态: 已结题
• 来源: https://www.nsf.gov/awardsearch/showAward?AWD_ID=1922521&HistoricalAwards=false
• 关键词: Microbial; landscapes; microorganisms; hidden; drivers

All plants live in places filled with many microbes, like bacteria and fungi, that are invisible to the naked eye. These microbes can help or hurt the plants they live with. For example, some microbes help plants grow in places without many nutrients, while other microbes cause disease. Given humanity's dependence on plants for food, shelter, clear air and fuel, understanding how microbes affect plant health is important, especially as the environment changes. This research will test how soil microbes help or hurt individual plants and how they may determine where groups of plants are found together. The goal is to see if microbes act as "hidden players" that explain patterns long thought to be explained by other things. Understanding microbial effects on plants can also improve how rare plants are managed and conserved, which is relevant because this project will take place in an area with many rare species. The project will provide training in field research for the next generation of scientists, including students from underrepresented groups at the University of Miami. Researchers will work with public school teachers to create nature documentaries and teaching modules to help middle school students learn about the hidden but important role of microbes in the world around them. This project has three main components. The first is to examine the interaction between well-known selection pressures (fire and allelopathy) and soil microbes on individual plant fitness. Next-generation sequencing will be used to determine how the soil microbiome responds to fire and allelopathy. Then, greenhouse experiments will be used to disentangle the role of differences in the soil microbes from differences in soil properties (and the interaction between the two) in governing plant fitness. The second component of the project will combine bioassays determining the effect of soil microbes on plant demographic parameters with existing long-term datasets to examine the demographic pathways and ecological contexts that allow microbes to influence plant population and metapopulation dynamics. This approach will use integral projection modeling to integrate microbial effects and patch-specific environmental parameters to understand the mechanistic basis for the distribution of 11 plant species across a patchy landscape. The final component will incorporate next-generation sequencing of soil microbiomes from ~700 sites into plant species distribution models to examine the relative importance of microbial and abiotic factors in determining the distributions of all ~80 members of the local plant community. Taken together, these new applications of modeling species distributions, demography, and metapopulations, parameterized with data from long-term studies and experiments, will shed light on the important linkages between plant distributions and their microbial associates.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.

所有的植物都生活在充满细菌和真菌等微生物的地方，这些微生物是肉眼看不见的。这些微生物可以帮助或伤害与它们一起生活的植物。例如，一些微生物帮助植物在缺乏营养的地方生长，而另一些微生物则导致疾病。考虑到人类对植物的食物、住所、清洁空气和燃料的依赖，了解微生物如何影响植物健康是很重要的，尤其是在环境变化的情况下。这项研究将测试土壤微生物是如何帮助或伤害单个植物的，以及它们如何决定植物群在哪里被发现。目的是看看微生物是否作为“隐藏的参与者”来解释长期以来被认为是由其他事物解释的模式。了解微生物对植物的影响也可以改善珍稀植物的管理和保护，这是相关的，因为这个项目将在一个拥有许多珍稀物种的地区进行。该项目将为下一代科学家提供实地研究培训，其中包括来自迈阿密大学代表性不足群体的学生。研究人员将与公立学校教师合作，制作自然纪录片和教学模块，帮助中学生了解微生物在他们周围世界中隐藏但重要的作用。这个项目有三个主要组成部分。首先是研究众所周知的选择压力（火和化感作用）和土壤微生物对植物个体适应性的相互作用。下一代测序将用于确定土壤微生物组对火和化感作用的反应。然后，温室实验将用于解开土壤微生物差异与土壤性质差异（以及两者之间的相互作用）在控制植物适应性方面的作用。该项目的第二个组成部分将结合确定土壤微生物对植物种群参数影响的生物分析与现有的长期数据集，以检查允许微生物影响植物种群和超种群动态的种群路径和生态背景。该方法将使用积分投影建模来整合微生物效应和斑块特定的环境参数，以了解斑块景观中11种植物分布的机制基础。最后一部分将把来自约700个地点的新一代土壤微生物组测序纳入植物物种分布模型，以检查微生物和非生物因素在确定所有约80个当地植物群落成员分布中的相对重要性。综上所述，这些模拟物种分布、人口统计学和元种群的新应用，以及长期研究和实验数据的参数化，将揭示植物分布与其微生物伴生物之间的重要联系。该奖项反映了美国国家科学基金会的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的知识价值和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

项目成果

Hydrology shapes microbial communities and microbiome‐mediated growth of an Everglades tree island species

水文学塑造微生物群落和微生物组——介导大沼泽地树岛物种的生长

• DOI: 10.1111/rec.13677
• 发表时间: 2022
• 期刊: Restoration Ecology
• 影响因子: 3.2
• 作者: Almeida, Brianna K.;Cline, Eric;Sklar, Fred;Afkhami, Michelle E.
• 通讯作者: Afkhami, Michelle E.

Diversity and Structure of Soil Fungal Communities across Experimental Everglades Tree Islands

• DOI: 10.3390/d12090324
• 发表时间: 2020-08
• 期刊: Diversity
• 作者: Brianna K. Almeida;M. Ross;Susana L. Stoffella;J. Sah;E. Cline;F. Sklar;Michelle E. Afkhami

Climate Disruption of Plant-Microbe Interactions

• DOI: 10.1146/annurev-ecolsys-011720-090819
• 发表时间: 2020-11
• 期刊: Annual Review of Ecology, Evolution, and Systematics
• 作者: Jennifer A. Rudgers;Michelle E. Afkhami;Lukas Bell-Dereske;Y. A. Chung;K. Crawford;S. Kivlin;Michael Mann;Martin A. Nuñez

Multidimensional specialization and generalization are pervasive in soil prokaryotes

• DOI: 10.1038/s41559-023-02149-y
• 发表时间: 2023-08
• 期刊: Nature Ecology & Evolution
• 影响因子: 16.8
• 作者: Damian J. Hernandez;K. Kiesewetter;Brianna K. Almeida;Daniel Revillini;Michelle E. Afkhami

Fragmentation disrupts microbial effects on native plant community productivity

• DOI: 10.1111/1365-2745.14097
• 发表时间: 2023-03
• 期刊: Journal of Ecology
• 影响因子: 5.5
• 作者: K. Kiesewetter;Leydiana Otano;Michelle E. Afkhami