THE ROLE OF THERMAL ADAPTATION IN CONSTRAINING LONG-TERM BIOGEOCHEMICAL RESPONSES TO GLOBAL WARMING.

预测和减轻气候变化的破坏性程度将成为我们这个时代的决定性科学挑战。这方面的核心是理解气候系统中生物地球化学反馈的机制。生物地球化学循环（如C和N循环）是由代谢过程驱动的，这些代谢过程在生物圈和大气之间进行元素的转化和交换。尽管在过去十年中取得了重大进展，但我们目前缺乏对生态和进化过程如何介导生物地球化学对全球变暖的反应的机械理解。已知热适应是产生具有不同热生态位的分类群或谱系的重要过程，所述热生态位可以在描述其热性能曲线的参数（例如，热最适值、活化能、比速率）上不同。这个学生将利用我们的长期变暖实验和现场的微生物群落，以确定进化适应影响碳和氮循环中关键通量的长期热响应的程度。

Forecasting and mitigating damaging levels of climate change is set to be the defining scientific challenge of our age. Central to this is an understanding of the mechanisms underpinning biogeochemical feedbacks with the climate system. Biogeochemical cycles (e.g. C and N cycles) are driven by metabolic processes, which transform and exchange elements between the biosphere and the atmosphere. Despite major progress in the past decade, we currently lack a mechanistic understanding of how ecological and evolutionary processes mediate biogeochemical responses to global warming. Thermal adaptation is known to be an important process giving rise to taxa or lineages with distinct thermal niches that can differ in the parameters which characterise their thermal performance curves - e.g. thermal optima, activation energy, specific rate. This studentship will utilse microbial communities across our long-term warming experiments and field sites, to determine the extent to which evolutionary adaptation influences the long-term thermal responses of key fluxes in the carbon and nitrogen cycle.