THE ROLE OF THERMAL ADAPTATION IN CONSTRAINING LONG-TERM BIOGEOCHEMICAL RESPONSES TO GLOBAL WARMING.

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Forecasting and mitigating damaging levels of climate change is set to be the defining scientific challenge of our age. Central to this is an understanding of the mechanisms underpinning biogeochemical feedbacks with the climate system. Biogeochemical cycles (e.g. C and N cycles) are driven by metabolic processes, which transform and exchange elements between the biosphere and the atmosphere. Despite major progress in the past decade, we currently lack a mechanistic understanding of how ecological and evolutionary processes mediate biogeochemical responses to global warming. Thermal adaptation is known to be an important process giving rise to taxa or lineages with distinct thermal niches that can differ in the parameters which characterise their thermal performance curves - e.g. thermal optima, activation energy, specific rate. This studentship will utilse microbial communities across our long-term warming experiments and field sites, to determine the extent to which evolutionary adaptation influences the long-term thermal responses of key fluxes in the carbon and nitrogen cycle.