Microbial biodiversity-ecosystem function relationships in marine reducing habitats

在过去的20年里，海洋生态学的重点已经从记录生物多样性转变为希望了解生物多样性对海洋生态系统为人类社会和我们的行星支持系统所提供的服务的重要性。生态学家将功能特征或“生态系统工作描述”分配给物种和物种群体，以确定它们在生态系统中的作用，从光合作用，营养循环和捕食到鱼类种群的生产。 另一方面，研究海洋微生物的生态学家在这方面的转变相对较慢。部分原因是，新的高通量基因测序方法为海洋微生物学家提供的信息超过了有意义的生态解释的发展。该研究计划将重点关注海洋还原栖息地，其中溶解氧的变化导致微生物组成和代谢的变化。这些环境变化的梯度提供了直接观察微生物多样性与微生物对生态系统功能的代谢过程之间关系的机会。在过去的几年里，我的实验室已经开发或实施了一些分析工具，这些工具将对这个问题产生影响。* 一名博士生将研究溶解氧水平的季节性变化如何影响微生物群落多样性，以及导致海洋生态系统氮损失的特定群体的多样性，在萨尼奇湾，温哥华岛南部的峡湾。 另外两名学生（博士和硕士）将研究海洋微生物如何殖民其他生物形成的栖息地。这种生态促进作用为微生物生长和化学转化的集中创造了热点，这对生态系统功能至关重要。第三个博士生将研究原生生物，单细胞动物，在深海温泉的生态系统作用。我们对这些独特生态系统中原生生物的了解非常有限。因此，我们开始的根本问题，在哪里发现原生生物物种在喷口，存在一个喷口专门组的原生生物，以及栖息地条件如何决定原生生物多样性和分布在不同的热液栖息地的问题。这项调查工作将利用基因序列信息来评估不同喷口生境中的原生生物多样性，并确定主要参与者。 这一基本分类信息将用于根据现有知识和新的在线数据库绘制喷口原生生物群落的功能图。* 计算物种比确定它们在生态系统中的作用更容易，即使是微生物。一名博士后研究员将在最后一年加入该项目，以综合所有项目的数据，并评估生物多样性信息可以告诉我们海洋微生物如何为生态系统服务做出贡献。********

Over the past 2 decades, marine ecology has seen a shift in focus from documenting biodiversity to wanting to understand the importance of biodiversity to the services that marine ecosystems contribute to human society and to our planetary support system. Ecologists assign functional traits or 'ecosystem job descriptions' to species and groups of species that define their role in ecosystems, from photosynthesis, nutrient cycling and predation to the production of fish stocks. On the other hand ecologists who study marine microorganisms have been comparatively slower to make this change in perspective. In part, this is because new, high throughput gene sequencing methods are providing marine microbiologists with information at a level that surpasses the development of meaningful ecological interpretation. This research program will focus on marine reducing habitats, where changes in dissolved oxygen cause shifts in microbial composition and metabolism. These gradients of environment change provide opportunities to directly observe relationships between microbial diversity, and the metabolic processes that microbes contribute to ecosystem function. Over the past several years my laboratory has developed or implemented a number of analytical tools that will be brought to bear on this question. ***A PhD student will study how seasonal changes in dissolved oxygen levels influence microbial community diversity, and the diversity of a particular group that causes nitrogen loss from marine ecosystems, in Saanich Inlet, a fjord on southern Vancouver Island. Two other students (PhD an MSc) will examine how marine microbes colonize habitats formed by other organisms. This ecological facilitation' creates hot spots for the concentration of microbial growth and chemical transformations that are important to ecosystem function. A 3rd PhD student will study the ecosystem role of protists, single-celled animals, at deep-sea hot springs. Our understanding of protists in these unique ecosystems is very limited. We thus begin with fundamental questions about where protist species are found at vents, the existence of a vent-specialized group of protists, and questions about how habitat conditions determine protist diversity and distribution in different hydrothermal habitats. This survey work will use gene sequence information to assess protist diversity in different vent habitats and identify key players. This basic taxonomic information will be used to construct functional portraits of vent protist communities, based on current knowledge and a new online database. ***It is easier to count species than to determine what they do in ecosystems, even for microbes. A postdoctoral fellow will join the project in the final year to synthesize data from all projects, and evaluate what biodiversity information can tell us about how marine microbes contribute to ecosystem services. ********