Details of Award
NERC Reference : NE/P014208/1
Resilience of below-ground fungal communities: a mechanistic and trait-based approach
Grant Award
- Principal Investigator:
- Professor W Otten, Cranfield University, Sch of Energy, Environment and Agrifood
- Co-Investigator:
- Professor RE Falconer, Abertay University, Sch of Arts Media and Computer Games
- Grant held at:
- Cranfield University, Sch of Energy, Environment and Agrifood
- Science Area:
- Atmospheric
- Earth
- Freshwater
- Marine
- Terrestrial
- Overall Classification:
- Unknown
- ENRIs:
- Biodiversity
- Environmental Risks and Hazards
- Global Change
- Natural Resource Management
- Science Topics:
- Soil science
- Complexity Science
- Community Ecology
- Biogeochemical Cycles
- Abstract:
- Soil provides a home to a large number of soil organisms and provides a number of services that are underpinning human health. These include storage of carbon and nutrients, which is critical for production of food and contributes to minimising the impact of Global Warming, the provision of antibiotics often derived from soil fungi, to provide and filter water and regulate hydrological cycles. There is however increasing concern that soils are in decline and may not be able to fulfil these services to the same extent if not managed sustainably. The problem we are facing is that we currently have little understanding of how soils respond to change, how this will impact on the microbial community and how this in turn will affect services mediated by microbial life. Our project will tackle this problem by developing for the first time a theoretical framework that links soil properties, such as the complex geometry of pores within which microbes live, with biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. We will do so by demonstrating interactions and feedbacks for soil borne fungi. Fungi can influence nearly every process that occurs in soil. There are up to 1.5 million different species of fungi, and they can form between 55 and 89% of the biomass of microbial life in soils. They are characterised by a mycelial growth form that enables them to spread through soil pores over large distances exploring the soil environment for C whilst avoiding competitors. As they interact with the environment and competing species a complex community emerges that delivers services to mankind, such as C decomposition or sequestration. It is generally believed that the diversity of a community makes soils resilient to changes and allows it to deliver services over a wide range of environmental conditions such as wetness, drought, temperature changes, but also various management strategies including organic amendments and tillage operations. This is because various competing species fulfil similar roles and can induce feedbacks that mediate perturbations to the system. It is therefore important that we understand how these interactions shape these communities, how they respond to perturbations and what risks they are under to be no longer capable of adapting to change. To be able to answer those questions we need to have a fundamental understanding that is currently lacking. The project will develop such a fundamental framework that will address these questions and identify what key soil properties and fungal traits make a soil more or less resilient and indicate what management options can be put in place to manage soils to be more resilient towards physical changes, such as induced by tillage operations, or wetness and drought cycles, which are envisaged to increase in extreme due to climate change. The mathematical approach followed in this proposal will be able to explore situations beyond what is experimentally tractable and can therefore identify limits beyond which soils are at risk of losing the ability to resist consequences of environmental perturbations. The questions addressed are at the heart of the soil security programme which seeks to address how soils function and how this functioning can be sustainably managed to enable soils to resist or adapt to perturbations such as those imposed by soil management or environmental change.
- NERC Reference:
- NE/P014208/1
- Grant Stage:
- Completed
- Scheme:
- Directed (RP) - NR1
- Grant Status:
- Closed
- Programme:
- Soil Security
This grant award has a total value of £234,072
FDAB - Financial Details (Award breakdown by headings)
| DI - Other Costs | Indirect - Indirect Costs | DA - Investigators | DA - Estate Costs | DI - Staff | DA - Other Directly Allocated | DI - T&S |
|---|---|---|---|---|---|---|
| £11,916 | £83,643 | £40,113 | £21,192 | £67,234 | £2,687 | £7,288 |
If you need further help, please read the user guide.