Microbial landscapes: Are microorganisms hidden drivers of species distributions?

所有植物都生活在充满细菌和真菌等微生物的地方，这些微生物是肉眼看不到的。这些微生物可以帮助或伤害与它们一起生活的植物。例如，一些微生物帮助植物在没有太多营养的地方生长，而另一些微生物则会导致疾病。鉴于人类依赖植物提供食物、住所、清洁空气和燃料，了解微生物如何影响植物健康至关重要，特别是在环境变化的情况下。这项研究将测试土壤微生物如何帮助或伤害单个植物，以及它们如何确定植物群在哪里被发现。其目的是观察微生物是否充当了“隐藏的参与者”，解释了长期以来被认为可以由其他事物解释的模式。了解微生物对植物的影响也可以改善稀有植物的管理和保护，这是相关的，因为这个项目将在一个有许多稀有物种的地区进行。该项目将为下一代科学家提供实地研究培训，包括来自迈阿密大学代表性不足群体的学生。研究人员将与公立学校教师合作，制作自然纪录片和教学模块，帮助中学生了解微生物在周围世界中隐藏但重要的作用。 该项目有三个主要组成部分。第一个是研究众所周知的选择压力（火和化感作用）和土壤微生物对个体植物适合度的相互作用。下一代测序将用于确定土壤微生物组如何对火和化感作用作出反应。然后，温室实验将被用来解开土壤微生物的差异在土壤性质的差异（以及两者之间的相互作用）在管理植物健身的作用。该项目的第二个组成部分将结合联合收割机生物测定确定土壤微生物对植物人口参数的影响与现有的长期数据集，以检查人口途径和生态环境，使微生物影响植物种群和集合种群动态。这种方法将使用积分投影建模，以整合微生物的影响和斑块特定的环境参数，以了解整个斑块景观的11种植物物种的分布的机制基础。最后一个组成部分将把来自约700个地点的土壤微生物组的下一代测序纳入植物物种分布模型，以检查微生物和非生物因素在确定当地植物群落所有约80个成员的分布方面的相对重要性。总之，这些新的应用模型的物种分布，人口统计学，和集合种群，参数化的数据，从长期的研究和实验，将揭示植物分布和它们的微生物associated.This奖项之间的重要联系反映了NSF的法定使命，并已被认为是值得通过评估使用基金会的智力价值和更广泛的影响审查标准的支持。

All plants live in places filled with many microbes, like bacteria and fungi, that are invisible to the naked eye. These microbes can help or hurt the plants they live with. For example, some microbes help plants grow in places without many nutrients, while other microbes cause disease. Given humanity's dependence on plants for food, shelter, clear air and fuel, understanding how microbes affect plant health is important, especially as the environment changes. This research will test how soil microbes help or hurt individual plants and how they may determine where groups of plants are found together. The goal is to see if microbes act as "hidden players" that explain patterns long thought to be explained by other things. Understanding microbial effects on plants can also improve how rare plants are managed and conserved, which is relevant because this project will take place in an area with many rare species. The project will provide training in field research for the next generation of scientists, including students from underrepresented groups at the University of Miami. Researchers will work with public school teachers to create nature documentaries and teaching modules to help middle school students learn about the hidden but important role of microbes in the world around them. This project has three main components. The first is to examine the interaction between well-known selection pressures (fire and allelopathy) and soil microbes on individual plant fitness. Next-generation sequencing will be used to determine how the soil microbiome responds to fire and allelopathy. Then, greenhouse experiments will be used to disentangle the role of differences in the soil microbes from differences in soil properties (and the interaction between the two) in governing plant fitness. The second component of the project will combine bioassays determining the effect of soil microbes on plant demographic parameters with existing long-term datasets to examine the demographic pathways and ecological contexts that allow microbes to influence plant population and metapopulation dynamics. This approach will use integral projection modeling to integrate microbial effects and patch-specific environmental parameters to understand the mechanistic basis for the distribution of 11 plant species across a patchy landscape. The final component will incorporate next-generation sequencing of soil microbiomes from ~700 sites into plant species distribution models to examine the relative importance of microbial and abiotic factors in determining the distributions of all ~80 members of the local plant community. Taken together, these new applications of modeling species distributions, demography, and metapopulations, parameterized with data from long-term studies and experiments, will shed light on the important linkages between plant distributions and their microbial associates.This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.