BRC-BIO A trait-based approach to determine fungal responses to global change drivers

This project will study how climate change affects soil fungi. Soil fungi are important for the well-being of ecosystems. For example, plants and animals would not exist without fungi because fungi provide critical resources while also carrying out important processes like recycling of organic matter. Because of how important they are, it is crucial to understand how global climate change is affecting them, and how that in turn, can affect the recycling of organic matter and the emissions of greenhouse gases. However, studying fungi has been difficult because fungi are very complicated and finding ways to study them has been difficult. This research is important because it examines ecological traits, like how fast fungi can grow, that will allow tests of how fungi are responding to global climate change. This will advance scientific knowledge needed to predict how ecosystems will look under global climate change and how that will affect the recycling of organic matter and the emission of greenhouse gases. Consequently, this project will help with the development of ideas and plans to mitigate the effects of global climate change. In addition, the research will involve undergraduate and graduate students in research by providing hands-on experiences and individualized mentoring to a diverse group of students. This research develops a trait-based approach to determine fungal responses to global change drivers. It has three objectives. The first is the creation of a trait-based framework using microbiology-based techniques combined with sophisticated molecular tools to obtain insight on how fungi are responding to global climate change and the extent of their response. The expectation is that fungal species will respond differently to global change drivers and that specific functional categories will withstand global change drivers better than others as predicted by their traits. The second objective is to test the predictive strength and accuracy of the trait-based framework under controlled laboratory conditions using mock fungal communities in microcosms. The expected outcome is that there will be an increase in the abundance of fungi that are stress tolerators as compared to non-stress tolerators when they are grown under stressful conditions; this trend is predicted to become stronger as the experiment progresses in time. The last objective will test the trait-based framework using global change field experiments that mimic predicted conditions in ecosystems to determine the generality of the framework in modeling and predicting how fungal communities will respond to climate change. This project is jointly funded by the Building Research Capacity of New Faculty in Biology program, the Established Program to Stimulate Competitive Research (EPSCoR), and the Population & Community Ecology program. 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.