Grant: Research Tools and Instruments

Crops are very sensitive to environmental factors. Climate change is one of the single biggest threats to the economic, ecological, and social sustainability of global agriculture. Increasing frequency of extreme climatic events (heat, drought, floods, forest fires) and limited resource availability (drought, nutrient deficiencies) are putting unprecedented strains globally on crop production systems, and across Canadian agricultural regions. Scientist must develop a better understanding of the impacts of the changing climate on crop physiology and ecology, including changes to crop-soil biogeochemistry, and provide farmers with adaptation/mitigation strategies for sustaining crop production in a changing climate. This proposal requests funding support for the purchase of a portable CO2/H2O gas analysis system for analyzing leaf and soil gas exchanges. The equipment will be used to perform direct measurements of stomatal behavior and photosynthetic efficiency in crops (grapevine, blueberries, potatoes, etc.) and peatlands as well to assess the gas exchanges of soils in these ecosystems. Such measurements and assessment are necessary to determine the physiological responses of vegetation as well as the gas fluxes between the soil and the atmosphere in response to specific climatic conditions and/or environmental stresses. The equipment will be used by Castellarin and Black in the Faculty of Land and Food Systems, and Knox in the Geography Department at the University of British Columbia to work on projects that aim to elucidate i) the mechanisms controlling the crop physiological response to factors such as temperature, water availability, and nutrition, and ii) gas exchange and evapotranspiration of agricultural and non-agricultural soils exposed to climatic stressors such as fires. The need for this equipment is urgent as similar equipment in the applicants' labs is obsolete and its maintenance is not supported any longer by the production company (LI-COR Inc.). The applicants' research projects - funded by NSERC DG, the CRC Program, the BC Investment Agriculture Foundation, the AAFC Canadian Agricultural Partnership, and Metro Vancouver's Sustainability Innovation Program - strongly rely on such equipment. The research conducted with such equipment will provide critical knowledge to support BC, Canadian, and international scientists and farmers in developing crop management strategies to optimize production, minimizing inputs (fertilizers) and negative outputs (greenhouse gases emission) under future climate scenarios. Furthermore, this equipment will allow for better assessment of the impacts of climate change and disturbance (fire) on soil-atmosphere gas exchange. The requested equipment is necessary to support the training of a large number of current and future undergraduate and graduate students, and postdoctoral fellows, as it is a key instrument to study plant physiology and productivity as well as soil ecology and gas exchanges.