BRC-BIO A trait-based approach to determine fungal responses to global change drivers

该项目将研究气候变化如何影响土壤真菌。土壤真菌对生态系统的健康很重要。例如，如果没有真菌，动植物就不会存在，因为真菌提供了关键的资源，同时也执行着重要的过程，如有机物的循环利用。由于它们的重要性，了解全球气候变化如何影响它们，以及反过来如何影响有机物质的回收和温室气体的排放，是至关重要的。然而，研究真菌一直很困难，因为真菌非常复杂，而且很难找到研究它们的方法。这项研究很重要，因为它检查了生态特征，比如真菌生长的速度，这将使测试真菌如何应对全球气候变化成为可能。这将促进所需的科学知识，以预测生态系统在全球气候变化下将是什么样子，以及这将如何影响有机物质的循环和温室气体的排放。因此，该项目将有助于制定减轻全球气候变化影响的想法和计划。此外，这项研究将让本科生和研究生参与研究，为不同的学生群体提供实践经验和个性化指导。这项研究开发了一种基于特征的方法来确定真菌对全球变化驱动因素的反应。它有三个目标。第一个是使用基于微生物学的技术和复杂的分子工具创建一个基于特征的框架，以深入了解真菌如何应对全球气候变化及其反应的程度。人们的期望是，真菌物种将对全球变化驱动因素做出不同的反应，特定的功能类别将比其他功能类别更好地抵御全球变化驱动因素，正如它们的特征所预测的那样。第二个目标是在受控实验室条件下，使用微观世界中的模拟真菌群落来测试基于特征的框架的预测强度和准确性。预期的结果是，当真菌在有压力的条件下生长时，与非耐受真菌相比，耐受胁迫的真菌的数量将会增加；预计随着实验的进展，这一趋势将变得更加强烈。最后一个目标将使用模拟生态系统中预测条件的全球变化实地实验来测试基于特征的框架，以确定该框架在建模和预测真菌群落将如何应对气候变化方面的一般性。该项目由生物学新学院的研究能力建设计划、激励竞争性研究的既定计划(EPSCoR)和人口与社区生态计划共同资助。该奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

This project will study how climate change affects soil fungi. Soil fungi are important for the well-being of ecosystems. For example, plants and animals would not exist without fungi because fungi provide critical resources while also carrying out important processes like recycling of organic matter. Because of how important they are, it is crucial to understand how global climate change is affecting them, and how that in turn, can affect the recycling of organic matter and the emissions of greenhouse gases. However, studying fungi has been difficult because fungi are very complicated and finding ways to study them has been difficult. This research is important because it examines ecological traits, like how fast fungi can grow, that will allow tests of how fungi are responding to global climate change. This will advance scientific knowledge needed to predict how ecosystems will look under global climate change and how that will affect the recycling of organic matter and the emission of greenhouse gases. Consequently, this project will help with the development of ideas and plans to mitigate the effects of global climate change. In addition, the research will involve undergraduate and graduate students in research by providing hands-on experiences and individualized mentoring to a diverse group of students.This research develops a trait-based approach to determine fungal responses to global change drivers. It has three objectives. The first is the creation of a trait-based framework using microbiology-based techniques combined with sophisticated molecular tools to obtain insight on how fungi are responding to global climate change and the extent of their response. The expectation is that fungal species will respond differently to global change drivers and that specific functional categories will withstand global change drivers better than others as predicted by their traits. The second objective is to test the predictive strength and accuracy of the trait-based framework under controlled laboratory conditions using mock fungal communities in microcosms. The expected outcome is that there will be an increase in the abundance of fungi that are stress tolerators as compared to non-stress tolerators when they are grown under stressful conditions; this trend is predicted to become stronger as the experiment progresses in time. The last objective will test the trait-based framework using global change field experiments that mimic predicted conditions in ecosystems to determine the generality of the framework in modeling and predicting how fungal communities will respond to climate change. This project is jointly funded by the Building Research Capacity of New Faculty in Biology program, the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), and the Population & Community Ecology program.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.