Soil Biodiversity and Ecosystem Function under Climate Change

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The loss of biodiversity is the greatest threat facing ecosystem health in the world today. Many ecosystems are currently undergoing dramatic changes in biodiversity due to habitat loss and fragmentation associated with land use change, pollution, overexploitation, and climate change. My research will provide the science necessary to help mitigate this loss by uncovering the drivers of biodiversity loss, and the consequences of loss on ecosystem processes and functioning. As there is unequivocal evidence linking the effects of global change, soil biodiversity and nutrient cycling, my research uses a terrestrial-detrital system to experimentally study the regulation and functional significance of biodiversity in the context of global change, specifically with respect to carbon sequestration and nitrogen dynamics in forest soils. I use two approaches to obtain accurate assessment of soil biodiversity, calculate rates of biologically mediated processes, and measure ecosystem function by way of detailed nutrient analysis; a food-web approach to understand the interactions among species within the community, and a mass-balance approach to account for nutrients and energy as they move through the food web. Over the next five years, my lab will develop long-term field sites in the Boreal forest and create meso-ecosystems under controlled laboratory conditions to isolate the ecological mechanisms that drive the relationships between global change, biodiversity and nutrient cycling. This program will address how changes in biodiversity equate to changes in ecosystem-level processes, if these changes dictate whether the system becomes a net carbon sink or a net carbon source, and is the first to incorporate biodiversity into designing carbon sequestration enhancement initiatives under environmental change scenarios for Canadian forest systems. By increasing our understanding of soil biodiversity-mediated processes associated with soil carbon and nitrogen cycles, this research will help identify how to mitigate the impacts of environmental change and maintain ecosystem function in forest soil systems. Research in my lab broadly spans the areas of community ecology, ecosystem ecology, and applied terrestrial conservation.