The soil microbial role in northern forests and peatlands

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Northern forests and peatlands are exceptionally important in part because they store vast amounts of atmospheric carbon dioxide as organic matter in soils, exchange methane with the atmosphere, and support forestry and peat natural resource industries. Canada is the world's largest exporter of forest products and contains the world's second largest peatland area. Soil microbial communities are responsible for the net release of greenhouse gasses from soils and simultaneously cycle nutrients that are essential for ecosystem productivity. Presently there is still a great deal unknown about the role of microbial communities in soil processes and this leads to uncertainties in our understanding of ecosystem behavior. The aim of this research is to use novel molecular and stable-isotope probing techniques, in conjunction with more classical approaches, to link soil microbial communities to ecosystem processes that have vast importance for climate change and sustainable resource management. Specifically this work will: 1) Compare and contrast microbial communities and ecosystem functioning across Canadian peatlands and forests that are hydrologically and biogeochemically connected. 2) Determine if silvicultural treatments including selection harvesting, thinning, forest fertilization, and clearcutting and new peat harvesting methods that will be used for extracting peat for alternative fuel in Ontario preserve important soil microbial diversity and functioning. 3) Identify specific microbial communities that, over time, transform plant material to soil organic matter and then to carbon dioxide and methane. Working across ecosystems, in applied settings with environmental disturbances, will be significant for both improving ecosystem and resource management in Canada and for providing a large gradient of environments to explore more fundamental principles of soil microbial ecology. The projects will train graduate and undergraduate students and provide them unique exposure to Canadian government researchers directly involved in natural resource management in Ontario and to national and international university research collaborators.