NSF Postdoctoral Fellowship in Biology FY 2021: Determining the mechanism that drive assembly in belowground microbial decomposer systems

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This action funds an NSF Postdoctoral Research Fellowship in Biology for FY 2021, Integrative Research Investigating the Rules of Life Governing Interactions Between Genomes, Environment and Phenotypes. The fellowship supports research and training of the Fellow that will contribute to the area of Rules of Life in innovative ways. Belowground soil microbes are key contributors to soil health and the global cycling of nutrients. Despite their importance to ecosystems, how belowground microbial communities that mediate biogeochemical processes will respond to environmental change or changes in land management practices remains poorly understood. This topic is of practical relevance, from improving models of climate-carbon cycle feedbacks globally to improving local, farm-level efforts to restore soils to improve health and agricultural productivity. For example, decomposition, or the microbial processes involved in the conversion of organic carbon to CO2, has direct consequences for C cycling, however predicting microbial controls on decomposition rates remains difficult. This research will use highly replicated soil microbial decomposition systems across diverse ecological sites to understand what predicts decomposition rates. As a part of this project, the Fellow will mentor undergraduate researchers through programs that support underrepresented undergraduate students in the sciences, and also develop outreach and training resources for training science teachers as subject matter experts on soil-carbon climate feedbacks and the microbial role in global environmental change. Specifically, this project will address questions including: 1) Can particular genomic functional processes predict rates of decomposition and to what extent these processes are consistent or varying with climatic and geographic signatures and 2) do mean-site versus local-scale observations generate different conclusions about the microbial functional traits associated with rates of decomposition? To address these objectives, this project will leverage a series of highly replicated in situ litterbag experiments from spatially explicit field plots across diverse ecological sites within the U.S. National Ecological Observatory Network and corresponding lab microcosm experiments. The Fellow will survey decomposer communities with functional ‘omics approaches and use hierarchical modeling to link rates of decomposition via litter loss and soil C respiration within and across sites to estimate the importance of particular groups of taxa and their functional attributes. Results from this project will help advance the quantitative understanding of microbial controls on decomposition rates – information that is currently difficult to leverage in terrestrial carbon models. The Fellow will gain training opportunities in mathematical modeling as well as developing communication skills in mentoring, outreach, and grant writing.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.