Resistance and resilience of mountain soils in the face of change

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Mountain ecosystems are extreme environments, experiencing strong seasonal contrasts in climate. The plant and animal communities that are found there are uniquely adapted to these extremes, and together create a familiar and magnificent landscape. This landscape represents a beautiful, apparently empty wilderness to many, yet it provides numerous benefits upon which we all rely, such as water storage and purification, storage of carbon and nutrients in soils, agriculture (such as grazing), as well as a habitat for many rare plant and animal species. The ability for mountain ecosystems to support these attributes depends upon the resistance to extreme conditions, and this is nowhere more important than in the soils. Often thin and superficial, mountain soils support the very functioning of the ecosystem as a whole, by cycling carbon and a nutrients, and providing habitats for billions of microbes, and hundreds of plant species. Knowledge about these soils, and the microbes that inhabit them is very poor, and this knowledge gap vastly reduces our ability to understand how mountain ecosystems might change under a changing climate, or due to alterations in land use. One direction of change, which is rarely considered, is changing snow cover in our mountains. There are increasing data which show snow cover reducing in the northern hemisphere, and this is predicted to continue as we move through the century. Snow acts like a blanket, covering the soil and insulating it against extremes of temperature. Loss of snow will expose the soil to these extremes, but also reduce the availability of water for plants and soil microbes, with potentially strong negative impacts on the functioning of these ecosystems. This is nowhere more significant than in the mountains of Western Europe, which hold large stores of very old soil carbon, which if released due to climate warming, could drastically change the functioning of the ecosystem, and also contribute towards climate change through a feedback mechanism. The soil security theme aims to understand how our soils will respond to change, and how the microbial communities that are found in soils can withstand change - resistance, and recover from extremes - resilience. This project aims to understand the resistance and resilience of mountain soils to climate extremes, and to long-term climate warming. In this project, soils from different regions of the UK and continental Europe will be studied. These soils will be examined to see what kind of microbes can be found, and how they contribute to the cycling of carbon and nutrients. By exposing these soils to simulated extreme climatic events such as freezing, and high rainfall, we can explore how resistant and resilient they are. This will allow us to forecast how our mountain soils might change over the coming years. The project will also use an existing research site in the Scottish alpine, where a climate simulation of warming has been running since 2004. There, we can use cutting edge techniques using isotopes of carbon (different 'forms' of carbon that are found in varying quantities in the environment, and can be used to track processes) to explore how the soil has responded in the medium term (over a decade), and how this might continue as the climate continues to warm. This will take advantage of the Natural Environment Research Councils world-class facilities at the Radiocarbon Lab in East Kilbride. We can then use these data to improve models that are used to predict how ecosystems will respond under climate change, and how we can incorporate this knowledge into policy and land management to safeguard this vital ecosystem. Based at the University of Lancaster's Environment Centre, this project will draw on the world-leading expertise in terrestrial ecology found in the UK, and bring in European partners to tackle this highly pressing ecological challenge to understand the resistance and resilience of mountain soils in the face of change.