Resilience of soil microbial communities to extreme weather

Project Highlights:
- Biological soil communities (BSC) at the soil surface perform vital ecosystem functions, including C and N fixation, and protection of the soil surface from erosion.
- The project will quantify the ecosystem functions of BSC in temperate soils and investigate the way in which they will be affected by climate change, including extreme weather events
- A wide variety of cutting edge microbiological, molecular biology and gas analysis techniques will be used, including novel gas sensor technologies for continuous reporting of both greenhouse gas emissions from soil and other soil metabolic activity.

Overview:

Soil possesses a complex biological layer at the surface, comprised of cyanobacteria, bacteria, algae and bryophytes. These have been well studied in deserts, where they have considerable environmental importance because of their role in nitrogen and carbon fixation, determining water infiltration and evaporation and protecting the soil against erosion. We have shown that such biological soil crusts (BSC) can also form in temperate soils, and have similar biological compositions to those in deserts, suggesting that they may perform similar, vital, ecosystem roles.

Climate change is affecting weather patterns, increasing the frequency, magnitude and duration of extreme weather events such as high temperature, drought, flooding and extreme rainfall. Since BSC inhabit the interface between the atmosphere and the soil, the resilience of BSC to changes in weather patterns is likely to play a key role in determining how extreme weather events impact soil sustainability and resilience of its ecosystem functions.

This project will investigate the functions of BSC in temperate soil, and the way in which these will be impacted by climate change, including extreme weather events.