Grant: Discovery Grants Program - Individual

One of the major challenges in biology is to understand the relationship between biological diversity and ecosystem functioning. The boreal forest is the world's largest terrestrial biome and a major C sink for global climate regulation. However, little is known about soil biotic diversity and functioning in this vast system. This is especially troubling given that global change factors such as climate change and biological invasions represent major threats to biodiversity and to a functionally healthy boreal forest. How do multiple global change factors interact to affect ecosystem level processes (e.g., diversity-primary productivity) which are tightly regulated by soil biotic communities in the boreal? Few studies have investigated more than one or two factors and even fewer have focused on boreal systems. The proposed research aims to contribute to filling in this knowledge gap, building on the research and infrastructure established in the Plant and Soil Ecology Lab at Algoma University. Specifically, it will focus on how climate change factors affect plant-soil biota interactions with implications for boreal forest health. The scientific approach to address this question will consist of using recent theoretical and empirical advances in plant-soil feedbacks and second-generation sequencing technologies which can link soil biotic diversity and functioning. The novelty of such program is based on three main points: 1) the proposed research will be concordant with the view that communities include guilds of interacting species; 2) the research will modulate multiple interacting global change factors (i.e., temperature, soil water availability, nitrogen deposition and exotic plant invasions) and; 3) it will consider what soil biotic and plant communities determine resistance and resilience to such global change factors in the boreal forest context. Carrying out research that aims to understand the mechanisms that influence soil biotic and plant community structure is important not only from a scientific but also from a technological and socio-economic perspective. It is anticipated that the proposed work will contribute to the understanding of ecosystem stability and to the conservation of biodiversity. This is important because more diverse ecosystems not only have greater primary productivity but also are more resistant and can recover more quickly from stresses. It the overarching goal of this proposed NSERC DG to link diversity with function and to improve our understanding of the impacts of global change factors on boreal forest soils.   The proposed research will enable the training of HQP at different academic stages in plant-soil biota interactions with implications for biodiversity in a territory that is critical for Canadians and people everywhere. The results are likely to have impact in understanding how the boreal forest will respond to plant invasions and climate change.