CAREER: Harnessing Emergent Simplicity for High-Precision Predictions in High-Diversity Microbial Ecosystems

微生物群落在全球气候、农业、食品安全和环境健康中发挥着决定性的作用。它们的许多实际相关特性（例如，污染物的消耗速度）源于许多物种的相互作用，这使得即使在简化的实验室条件下也难以预测。自然系统更加复杂，通常由数百种相互作用的物种组成，人们预计预测会更加困难。然而，最近的证据表明，至少在某些情况下，拥有许多物种的群落实际上可能遵循更简单的“涌现”关系。本项目将发展一套理论来解释这一实证观察；利用物理学方法对生态系统属性可能表现出的突现简化进行分类；将这种理解转化为一种方法，用于解开新兴群落功能的生物机制，并在复杂生态系统模型（最低限度处理的农业土壤）中验证这种方法。该研究与教育活动相结合，整合了课程改革和高中推广，旨在将物理专业重塑为对高度量化的现实世界数据充满热情的学生的智力家园。这将通过创建一个集成的三级课程（适用于高中生、新生和高级本科生）来实现，该课程建立在数据驱动项目的公共图书馆上，以培养好奇心和关注相关的现实生活问题，并与圣路易斯地区的高中教师合作，将“物理学家作为数据向导”的角度整合到9-10年级的课程计划中。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。

Microbial communities play a defining role in global climate, agriculture, food safety, and environmental health. Many of their practically relevant properties (for example, rate of consumption of a contaminant) result from the interactions of many species, making them challenging to predict even in the simplified laboratory conditions. Natural systems are even more complex, often composed of hundreds of interacting species, and one expects predictions to be even more difficult. However, recent evidence shows that, at least in some cases, communities with many species may in fact obey simpler "emergent" relationships. This project will develop a body of theory explaining this empirical observation; use methods of physics to classify the kinds of emergent simplification that ecosystem properties can exhibit; adapt this understanding into a methodology for disentangling the biological mechanism of emergent community function, and validate this methodology in a model complex ecosystem (minimally processed agricultural soil). The research is integrated with educational activities integrating curriculum changes and high school outreach, aiming to rebrand the Physics major as the intellectual home for students passionate about working with highly quantitative real-world data. This will be achieved by creating an integrated three-level set of courses (for high school students, freshmen and advanced undergraduates), built on common library of data-driven projects that foster curiosity and focus on relatable real-life questions, and collaborating with high school teachers in the St. Louis area to integrate “Physicists as data wizards” angle into lesson plans at grades 9-10.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.