Collaborative Proposal: MSB-ENSA: Forest function from genes to canopies: disentangling the fine scale spatio-temporal variation in gene expression and tree growth

森林在调节气候方面发挥着关键作用，因为它们能够吸收和储存大气中的二氧化碳。森林的特性虽然常常被视为一个整体，但却是成千上万棵树的过程的综合结果。在森林中，物种内部和物种之间的个体树木在生理和生长方面对环境的反应各不相同。量化这种变化对于了解森林如何调节碳循环至关重要，因此对于改进预测森林如何应对未来气候波动的模型至关重要。目前的研究项目使用尖端的遗传技术，再加上对个体树木生长和生理的详细测量，以解决森林生物学中这些突出的重大挑战。森林生态系统是全球碳循环的关键参与者。对于那些调查当前和预测未来森林功能的人来说，一个巨大的挑战是将发生在叶子一级的过程与发生在森林一级的过程联系起来。这些努力的关键是了解哪里存在差异，以及了解这些信息在多大程度上改善了预测。个体通过其表型与环境相互作用，最终表现为提供紧急的生态系统级特性。因此，环境的急性和慢性变化本质上是一种个人层面的现象。丰富的分析叶水平的功能和联系，这样的信息，个别树和整个森林的碳通量是罕见的树生态学，由于物流的限制，并集中在少数叶的属性。本项目通过量化叶片生理性状和基因表达来分析叶片水平在几个生长季节中的功能。采样是在两个氖站点，其中存在显着的基础设施，使我们能够将这些叶级性能森林尺度的碳通量和环境的措施。

Forests play a key role in regulating climate due to their ability absorb and store CO2 from the atmosphere. While often treated as a whole, the properties of forests are the aggregated outcome of processes happening on the level of thousands of individual trees. Individual trees within and between species in a forest vary in their physiological and growth response to the environment. Quantifying this variation is critical for understanding how forests regulate the carbon cycle and therefore for improving models that project how forests will respond to future fluctuations in climate. The present research project uses cutting edge genetic technology coupled with detailed measurements of individual tree growth and physiology to address these outstanding grand challenges in forest biology. Forested ecosystems are key players in the global carbon cycle. A grand challenge for those investigating current and projecting future forest functioning is linking processes occurring at the level of a leaf to those occurring at the level of a forest. Critical to these efforts is an understanding of where variation exists and the degree to which knowing that information improves projections. Individuals interact with their environments via their phenotypes and the resulting performance ultimately scales up to provide emergent ecosystem-level properties. Thus, acute and chronic changes to the environment are inherently an individual-level phenomenon. Rich assays of leaf level functioning and linkages of such information to individual tree and whole forest carbon flux are rare in tree ecology due to logistical constraints and a focus on a handful of leaf properties. The present project assays leaf level functioning throughout several growing seasons through the quantification of leaf physiological traits and gene expression. The sampling is performed at two NEON sites where significant infrastructure exists allowing us to link these leaf level properties to forest scale measures of carbon flux and the environment.