CNH2-L: Resilience to drought or a drought of resilience? The potential for interactions and feedbacks between human adaptation and ecological adaptation

环境变化性的增加将加剧许多地区的干旱。农业系统已经在通过人为决策，如安装灌溉系统，以及通过改变居住在农业土壤中的各种微生物群落来应对日益严重的干旱。在某些情况下，微生物对干旱的反应可能会保护植物免受干旱的影响，从而减少农民做出反应的需要。反过来，人类的决定，如决定灌溉或安装覆盖作物，可能会影响微生物群落和这些微生物保护作物免受干旱的能力。有趣的是，人类不同的决定可能会产生不同的影响。灌溉实际上可能导致微生物群落对植物的保护作用减弱，而提高土壤健康的做法(例如，覆盖作物或轮作)可能会促进微生物保护植物免受干旱的能力。因此，灌溉有可能产生反馈，降低微生物保护植物免受干旱的能力，反而增加对灌溉的依赖。相比之下，促进土壤健康的做法有可能增加保护性微生物群落，并引起反馈，从而提高长期弹性。然而，尚不清楚何时可能形成这种反馈，哪些农艺管理战略或土壤特性将阻止或促进这种反馈，以及农民将如何应对其微生物群落提供的益处。研究小组将测试农民和微生物如何应对干旱，农民的决定如何影响微生物群落，以及微生物群落及其提供的潜在抗旱能力如何保护农民免受气候变化的影响，并影响农民的管理决策。这项研究通过改进农业实践，具有直接的社会效益。由此产生的数据以及促进微生物保护农场免受干旱影响的能力的建议策略将与该团队的合作农民共享。该团队还将通过在州立博览会和当地博物馆展出的公开展品，向更广泛的农村观众传达他们的发现。最后，研究团队将通过主办研讨会与其他研究人员分享整合社会科学和生物数据的策略，并将通过博士后学者、研究生和本科生的指导来帮助培训下一代科学家。研究人员将使用适应的概念来连接社会科学和生态研究，以调查人类决策和微生物群落如何影响抗旱能力，以及社会和生态领域如何协同进化，朝着预期的生态系统功能的更大或更低的长期弹性方向发展。这项研究结合了进化理论和群落生态学中基于特征的方法来预测微生物群落何时会以促进生态适应和植物抗旱能力的方式发生变化，他们借鉴过去的社会学发现、决策模型和路径依赖理论来预测人类适应以及农民最有可能采取影响作物产量短期和长期适应能力的管理。研究人员通过将农民调查和采访与测试微生物保护作物免受干旱胁迫的能力的实验相结合来测试这些预测，以探索人类适应、生态适应以及由此产生的社会生态相互作用和反馈。这一奖项反映了NSF的法定使命，并通过使用基金会的智力优势和更广泛的影响审查标准进行评估，被认为值得支持。

Increasing environmental variability will increase drought in many regions. Agricultural systems are already responding to increased drought through human decisions, such as the installation of irrigation systems, and through changes in the diverse microbial communities that inhabit agricultural soils. In some cases, microbial responses to drought might protect plants from drought, reducing the need for farmers to respond. Reciprocally, human decisions, such as deciding to irrigate or installing cover crops, might affect microbial communities and the ability of those microbes to protect crops from drought. Interestingly, different human decisions are likely to have different effects. Irrigation might actually cause microbial communities to become less protective to plants, while practices that increase soil health (e.g., cover cropping or crop rotation) might promote the ability of microbes to protect plants from drought. As a result, irrigation has the potential to generate feedbacks that reduce the power of microbes to protect plants from drought and instead increase reliance on irrigation. In contrast, practices that promote soil health have the potential to increase protective microbial communities and cause feedbacks that increase long-term resilience. It is unclear, however, when such feedbacks are likely to develop, which agronomic management strategies or soil characteristics will prevent or promote such feedbacks and how farmers will respond to knowledge of the benefits provided by their microbial communities. The research team will test how both farmers and microbes respond to drought, how farmer decisions influence microbial communities, and how microbial communities and the potential drought tolerance they provide might protect farmers from climate change and influence farmer management decisions. The research has direct societal benefit through improving agricultural practices. The resulting data along with suggested strategies for promoting the capacity of microbes to protect their farms from drought will be shared with the team's partner farmers. The team also will communicate their findings to rural audiences more broadly through public exhibits presented at state fairs and local museums. Finally, the research team will share strategies for integrating social science and biological data with other researchers by hosting a workshop and will contribute to the training of the next generation of scientists through mentorship of post-doctoral scholars, graduate students, and undergraduate students.The investigators will use the concept of adaptation to bridge social science and ecological research to investigate how both human decisions and microbial communities influence resilience to drought and how social and ecological domains coevolve overtime, toward greater or reduced long-term resilience of desirable ecosystem functions. The research combines evolutionary theory and trait-based approaches in community ecology to predict when microbial communities will change in ways that promote ecological adaptation and plant resilience to drought, and they draw from past sociological findings, decision-making models and path-dependency theory to predict human adaptation and when farmers are most likely to pursue management that influences both short- and long-term resilience of crop yields. The researchers test these predictions by combining farmer surveys and interviews with experiments testing the capacity for microorganisms to protect crops from drought stress to explore human adaptation, ecological adaptation, and the resulting socio-ecological interactions and feedbacks.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.