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

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.

The proposed project has the potential to have huge impacts on both the academic and non-academic communities, as it addresses a fundamentally important question of global significance: what are the consequences of warming for biodiversity and the functioning of multi species systems? At an international level it has clear resonance for bodies involved with both scientific research and its implementation into policy, such as the IPCC and Diversitas/Future Earth (the Project Leader is a member of the Scientific Committee of the ecoSERVICES Project within Future Earth). At a national level, as an example, the British Ecology Society have recently produced a specially commissioned volume of Ecological Issues on Extreme Climatic Events in Freshwater Ecosystems that was launched at the Houses of Parliament in June 2013. The Principal Investigator (Woodward) leads the BES Aquatic Group and was also one of the authors of the report, which stresses the need to take a more integrated approach and to incorporate consideration of the microbial drivers of ecosystem service provision (e.g., carbon sequestration), and to link the underlying science more explicitly to future regulatory and management decisions.

The main national beneficiaries of this research among the end-user and stakeholder communities include the major UK environmental/conservation agencies (Department of Environment Food & Rural Affairs (DEFRA), Environment Agency (EA), Natural England (NE), Countryside Council for Wales (CCW), Scottish Natural Heritage (SNH), Centre for Ecology & Hydrology (CEH), British Antarctic Survey (BAS) and Centre for Environment, Fisheries and Aquaculture Science (CEFAS)), for whom understanding, predicting and mitigating the impacts of climate change in natural ecosystems is an essential remit falling under the 10 year Living With Environmental Change (LWEC) programme (www.nerc.ac.uk/research/programmes/lwec/). In particular, the outputs from our bioinformatics databases can ultimately be used to inform policy decisions regarding climate change and human induced perturbations to natural ecosystems.

The research outputs will also aid other regulatory and legislative end-users in identifying systems that may be particularly sensitive to climate change and will therefore also be of interest to commercial bodies (e.g. Syngenta, who work closely with Prof. Muggleton, and Unilever both have interest in understanding how warming will affect microbial assemblages and carbon sequestration). These include environmental consultancies and water companies, and industries that emit thermal discharges to aquatic systems, which are subject to biomonitoring and legislative regulation (e.g. the Scottish Speyside distillery industry that is monitored and regulated by SEPA).

Finally, the theoretical developments and new data gathered will be of particular interest to members of the scientific community, including those working in other fields of climate-change research outside the current Research Team's remit (e.g. IPCC climate-modelling scientists) as well as those involved in more closely-aligned research networks (e.g. Diversitas/Future Earth; EU REFRESH projects; NERC BESS Thematic Programme), and we believe that the proposal will open up important and exciting new avenues of both pure and applied research.