Global Adaptation of soil Microbes under Environmental Change

Introduction

The representation of soil carbon in models used by the Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change (IPCC) remains significantly underdeveloped, leading to uncertainty concerning some models predicting soils as carbon sinks and others as sources of carbon dioxide.

Microbe-Explicit Models

The development of microbe-explicit models is a very promising avenue for avoiding such inconsistencies and obtaining more accurate soil organic carbon (SOC) predictions. However, these models still suffer from uncertain parameterization due to the lack of data and the high variability in microbial responses at the ecosystem scale.

Challenges in Northern High-Latitude Soils

These issues are especially true in carbon-rich northern high-latitude soils that are most vulnerable to large SOC loss with global change. The variability in microbial response at the ecosystem scale is rooted in intricate microscale eco-evolutionary adaptive processes, namely:

1. Evolution
2. Dispersal
3. Filtering of community diversity

Contingency Effect

The diversity in microbiomes, resulting from past selection, influences present adaptive capacity and is referred to as the contingency effect.

GAMEchange Project

The GAMEchange project will harness a recent surge of novel microbial genomic data in order to parameterize a new generation of biogeochemical models that account for the effect of microbial adaptation on SOC, including contingency effects.

Coupled Modeling Approach

GAMEchange will couple the genome-parameterized microscale microbial model with a vegetation land model using a novel emulation approach. This novel coupled model will allow us to compare the 2100 SOC predictions with and without microbial adaptation.

Conclusion

This project will produce the first coupled soil microbe-land model parameterized with genomic data, laying the foundation for more realistic microbial models for IPCC climate projections.