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

由于森林吸收和储存大气中的二氧化碳的能力，森林在调节气候方面发挥着关键作用。虽然森林的属性通常被视为一个整体，但森林的属性是在数千棵单独的树木上发生的过程的聚合结果。森林中树种内和树种间的个别树木对环境的生理和生长反应各不相同。量化这种变化对于理解森林如何调节碳循环至关重要，因此对于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基因技术，结合对个体树木生长和生理的详细测量，以应对森林生物学中的这些突出的重大挑战。森林生态系统是全球碳循环中的关键角色。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发生在树叶水平上的过程与发生在森林水平上的过程联系起来。这些努力的关键是了解哪里存在差异，以及了解这些信息在多大程度上改善了预测。个体通过他们的表型与他们的环境互动，由此产生的性能最终会扩大到提供紧急的生态系统级别的属性。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几种树叶特性的关注，对树叶水平功能的丰富分析以及这种信息与个别树木和整个森林碳通量的联系很少见。本项目通过量化叶片的生理特性和基因表达来分析叶片在几个生长季节的功能水平。采样是在两个霓虹灯采样点进行的，那里有重要的基础设施，使我们能够将这些树叶水平属性与森林规模的碳通量和环境措施联系起来。

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.