Collaborative Proposal: MSB-ENSA: Forest function from genes to canopies: disentangling the fine scale spatio-temporal variation in gene expression and tree growth

森林具有从大气中吸收和储存二氧化碳的能力，因此在调节气候方面发挥着关键作用。虽然森林的特性通常被视为一个整体，但它是在成千上万棵树的水平上发生的过程的综合结果。单个树木在森林内和物种之间对环境的生理和生长反应是不同的。量化这种变化对于了解森林如何调节碳循环，从而改进预测森林将如何应对未来气候波动的模型至关重要。目前的研究项目使用尖端的基因技术，结合对单个树木生长和生理的详细测量，来解决森林生物学中这些突出的重大挑战。森林生态系统是全球碳循环的关键参与者。对于那些调查当前和预测未来森林功能的人来说，一个巨大的挑战是将树叶水平上发生的过程与森林水平上发生的过程联系起来。对这些努力至关重要的是了解变异存在的地方，以及了解这些信息在多大程度上改善了预测。个体通过其表型与环境相互作用，最终产生的表现扩大到提供紧急生态系统级别的特性。因此，环境的急性和慢性变化本质上是一种个人层面的现象。在树木生态学中，由于后勤限制和对少数叶片特性的关注，对叶片水平功能的丰富分析以及这些信息与单个树木和整个森林碳通量的联系是罕见的。本项目通过叶片生理性状和基因表达的量化来分析几个生长季节的叶片水平功能。采样是在两个NEON站点进行的，这些站点存在重要的基础设施，使我们能够将这些叶片水平属性与森林尺度的碳通量和环境测量联系起来。

Forests play a key role in regulating climate due to their ability absorb and store CO2 from the atmosphere. While often treated as a whole, the properties of forests are the aggregated outcome of processes happening on the level of thousands of individual trees. Individual trees within and between species in a forest vary in their physiological and growth response to the environment. Quantifying this variation is critical for understanding how forests regulate the carbon cycle and therefore for improving models that project how forests will respond to future fluctuations in climate. The present research project uses cutting edge genetic technology coupled with detailed measurements of individual tree growth and physiology to address these outstanding grand challenges in forest biology. Forested ecosystems are key players in the global carbon cycle. A grand challenge for those investigating current and projecting future forest functioning is linking processes occurring at the level of a leaf to those occurring at the level of a forest. Critical to these efforts is an understanding of where variation exists and the degree to which knowing that information improves projections. Individuals interact with their environments via their phenotypes and the resulting performance ultimately scales up to provide emergent ecosystem-level properties. Thus, acute and chronic changes to the environment are inherently an individual-level phenomenon. Rich assays of leaf level functioning and linkages of such information to individual tree and whole forest carbon flux are rare in tree ecology due to logistical constraints and a focus on a handful of leaf properties. The present project assays leaf level functioning throughout several growing seasons through the quantification of leaf physiological traits and gene expression. The sampling is performed at two NEON sites where significant infrastructure exists allowing us to link these leaf level properties to forest scale measures of carbon flux and the environment.