Postdoctoral Fellowship: EAR-PF: Geomicrobiology in the Critical Zone- integrating subsurface microbial processes across spatial and temporal scales.

Fairbanks, Dawson E, Tucson AZ

Investigators

Abstract

This EAR-PF project to Dr. Dawson Fairbanks, University of California-Riverside, explores the role that soil microbial communities’ diversity and functionality play in combating climate change. The work focuses on the responses of microbial communities to changing environmental conditions at a range of scales across the US and Puerto Rico. The goal is a deeper understanding of how soil responds to global change stressors and how soil types, vegetation, and climate regime influence the microbes that drive nutrient cycling in soil. Broader impacts of this work focus on education and outreach. Through lab and field-based student projects, this fellowship will train and prepare the next generation of STEM researchers. Public outreach events and science policy literature will provide information about the results of this project. The investigator will also engage policymakers through an op-ed about sustainable management practices. This project aims to understand the drivers of subsurface microbial functionality across continental scales. Subsurface microbial communities play a critical role in soil health, biogeochemical cycling, soil formation, and carbon storage, yet there is still much to learn about these communities, particularly at a continental scale. This project builds upon previous work, which identified drivers of microbial biodiversity across a continental scale, with some sites showing no change with depth and others a complete turnover of microbial communities. The goal of this project is to understand how subsoil microbial functionality differs across climate gradients and their impacts on Earth’s biogeochemical cycling. I hypothesize that soil type, hydrology, and lithology are critical to determining the depth to which surface influences such as vegetation and climate drive microbial community composition and activity. This project will use a combination of molecular techniques, including metagenomics and metatranscriptomics, to analyze the collected soil samples. I will also conduct statistical analyses to identify drivers of microbial community composition and function across different soil types, vegetation, and climate regimes. By analyzing data collected across the continental US and Puerto Rico, I aim to identify the underlying factors that determine the functional diversity of subsurface microbial communities. In order to scale the broad swath of metagenomic studies across various NSF networks, including LTER, NEON and CZNet, I will leverage data collected across networks to integrate discoveries into a larger metagenomic reference database to foster future discovery of novel taxa and functional pathways. The potential contributions of this project are significant. It will advance efforts to harmonize molecular information for microbial taxa and their functional traits, facilitating their integration with ecosystem-level data. Furthermore, it will enable future metagenomic studies to leverage environmental data, thereby stimulating further research in microbial ecology. Moreover, this project will provide valuable insights into the role of subsurface microbial communities in soil health, biogeochemical cycling, and carbon storage, which are essential for the development of sustainable management practices in the face of ongoing climate change. In summary, this project aims to deepen our understanding of the diversity and functionality of subsurface microbial communities, identify the drivers shaping these communities across different regions and depths, and elucidate their impacts on Earth's biogeochemical cycles. The findings of this project will be crucial for comprehending the effects of global change stressors on soil health and carbon storage, thus informing future sustainable management practices. 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.