OPUS: CRS: Trade-offs among fungal traits that influence responses to the environment and effects on ecosystems

University Of California-Irvine, Irvine CA

Investigators

Abstract

To help the U.S. prepare for droughts, wildfires, heat waves, and other environmental changes, this project will focus on invisible players in soil ecosystems: fungi. Although they are small, soil fungi are important because they strongly impact soil fertility and carbon (C) storage. Currently, scientists use computer simulations called Earth System Models to predict future environmental change. These models can be improved by including better information about how soil fungi function under different environmental conditions. In this project, researchers are gathering information from ten years of experiments on fungi in Alaska, California, and Costa Rica. Their work will analyze how thousands of fungal species respond to the environment, and link those species to their impact on ecosystem function. This information will be used to improve the predictive role of Earth System Models. In addition, the project will test foundational ideas about fungal ecology, like whether fungi that adapt to more stressful environmental conditions lose their ability to grow well under favorable conditions. The project also includes training for a PhD student and work to make field research practices safer, especially for women on scientific teams. A central challenge in ecosystem science is to improve predictions of carbon (C) cycling in ecosystems under future environmental conditions. The synthesis proposed for this fungal ecology project is a critical step in this process, and will leverage ten years of fungal DNA sequence data from experimental field manipulations. From these data, they will characterize how thousands of fungal taxa respond to contrasting environmental changes. Using the new community-generated Fungal Functional Traits Database, the PI and a graduate student will link the responses of individual taxa to their functional (i.e., morphological, physiological, and genetic) traits. They can then predict how changes in environmental conditions like drought can select for fungi that perform particular functions within ecosystems, like recalcitrant C production. Analyses will also test the applicability of Grime's Competitive-Stress Tolerance-Ruderal scheme for fungi, to determine whether evolutionary or physiological trade-offs preclude a given individual from thriving broadly under an array of conditions, including environmental stress and disturbance. The PI posits that across fungal taxa, the suites of functional traits associated with moderate, stable conditions versus those associated with environmental stress or disturbance will be negatively related to one another, owing to trade-offs among these traits. Via the synthesis activities described above, results are intended to move soil fungal ecology past the discovery phase and toward the interrogation of foundational conceptual frameworks. The value added will be a documentation of links between the responses of fungal taxa to the environment with their potential effects on ecosystems. The linkages discovered can be used to parameterize microbial trait-based models to improve predictions of C cycling in ecosystems. In addition, these analyses will expand the Fungal Functional Traits Database to include responses to environmental conditions. To facilitate use by the broader community, all products will be open-access and open-source. 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.