Do plant communities manipulate soil for drought resistance?

植物有不同的能力来改造土壤，使它们在压力下更有生产力和稳定性，但支撑过程的机制仍然知之甚少，尽管它们对土壤可持续性，粮食安全和气候变化具有重要意义。一些最引人注目的证据来自大沙尘暴等环境灾害，在那里，从不同的草原草到单一种植玉米的过渡直接导致了干旱期间毁灭性的风力土壤侵蚀。根就像土壤中的钢筋，分泌出聚合土壤的化合物，增加水分储存，帮助释放养分。通过堵塞孔隙或形成聚集结构，根系也对水分运输产生很大影响。因此，不同植物物种改造土壤的能力对它们自身的生产力有显著的好处，但也对更广泛的环境产生影响。在一个多样化的植物群落中，一个物种的根系特征在土壤中产生互补效应，可能对另一个物种有益。这个博士项目将解开一系列的过程，驱动土壤结构形成的植物根系的不同社区，然后探索连锁的有益影响，使植物抵抗，恢复和适应干旱。你将回答这些科学问题：1。不同种类植物的根系特征是如何使土壤结构对它们有利的？2.植物群落是否在根系生长和资源捕获方面推动土壤结构的互补变化？3.植物多样性是否通过改变土壤物理结构来减少干旱影响？使用该团队开发的小规模测试方法，您将能够测量从根界面到植物群落根区的水分传输和机械行为。X射线CT可以测量根系生长和孔隙结构随时间的变化，并与传统的土壤物理测量相补充。您将有机会探索不同植物物种，植物物种群落和不同土壤条件的影响。实验将首先在受控条件下进行，其中物种组成和施加的压力，如干旱，可以仔细操纵。然后，它可能会转向实地实验，探索物种组成对草原和农田的影响，可能会利用詹姆斯赫顿研究所和农业食品和生物科学研究所的现有平台。该研究与探索土壤的可持续管理非常相关，包括覆盖作物，间作和草地物种丰富度等管理方案，您将学习一系列专业的土壤物理和生物实验室测试方法，包括使用最先进的X射线CT来可视化土壤内部。阿伯丁大学保留了英国唯一的土壤科学硕士学位，如果你来自另一个学科，这可能是有用的。土壤科学已被确定为英国的一个主要技能缺口，由于对粮食安全和环境可持续性的担忧，土壤科学的资助机会和研究就业能力有所增加。来自贝尔法斯特皇后大学的合作监督提供了高级统计和稳定性生态系统建模方面的培训机会。

Plants have differing abilities to engineer soil to make them more productive and stable under stress, but the mechanisms that underpin processes remain poorly understood, despite their significance to soil sustainability, food security and climate change. Some of the most dramatic evidence comes from environmental disasters like the Great Dust Bowl, where the transition from diverse prairie grasses to monoculture maize led directly to devastating wind borne soil erosion during drought. Roots act like reinforcing rods in soil and exude compounds that aggregate soils, increase water storage and help release nutrients. By clogging pores or creating an aggregated structure, roots also have a large impact on water transport. The ability of different plant species to engineer soil therefore has significant benefits to their own productivity but also impacts to the wider environment. In a diverse plant community, root traits of one species create complementary effects within the soil that might be beneficial to another species. This PhD project will disentangle a range of processes that drive soil structure formation by diverse communities of plant roots, and then explore the knock-on beneficial effects that enable plants to resist, recover and adapt to drought. You will be answering these scientific questions:1. How do root traits of different species of plants drive soil structure to their own advantage?2. Do communities of plants drive complementary changes to soil structure, in terms of root growth and resource capture?3. Does plant biodiversity decrease drought impacts by modifying soil physical structure?Using small-scale testing methods developed by the team, you will be able to perform measurements of water transport and mechanical behaviour from the root-interface up to the root zones of plant communities. X-Ray CT enables measurement of root growth and pore structure changes over time, which will be complemented with traditional soil physical measurements. You will have the opportunity to explore the effects of different plant species, communities of plant species and different soil conditions. Experiments will first be conducted in controlled conditions where species composition and imposed stresses such as drought can be carefully manipulated. It may then move to field experiments exploring species composition impacts in grasslands and croplands, potentially drawing on established platforms at the James Hutton Institute and the Agri-Food and Biosciences Institute. The research is very relevant to exploring the sustainable management of soils, including management options such as cover crops, intercropping and grass sward species richness.You will learn a range of specialist soil physical and biological laboratory testing approaches, including the use of state-of-the-art X-Ray CT to visualise inside the soil. The University of Aberdeen retains the only MSc in Soil Science in the UK, which could be useful if you come from another discipline. Soil science has been identified as a major skill-gap in the UK and has experienced increased funding opportunities and research employability due to concerns about food security and environmental sustainability. Collaborative supervision from Queens University of Belfast provides training opportunities in advanced statistics and ecosystem modelling of stability.