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Soil MIcrobial responses to land use and climatic changes in the Light of Evolution

Project description

Digging deeper into how soil microbes release carbon and nutrients

How do soil microbes access, transform, store and release their most important resources, carbon and nutrients? In the context of land use and climatic changes, are microbial processes promoting retention or loss of soil carbon and nutrients? What’s known is that these processes have global-scale impacts. However, it remains difficult to understand and quantify how microbes respond to changes in resources locally. The EU-funded SMILE project is proposing a new theory based on the idea that microbial use of soil resources is optimised by natural selection. This approach, which accounts for microbial adaptation, will be implemented in new models of soil carbon and nutrients that will help understand how land use and climatic changes affect soils.

Objective

Quoting T. Dobzhansky, “nothing in biology makes sense except in the light of evolution”. This idea could shed new light on how soil microbes access, transform, store, and release their most important resources – carbon and nutrients. We know that these microbial processes have global-scale impacts, including climate regulation and provision of nutrients to plants, but how microbes respond to changes in resources remains challenging to understand and quantify with models. In fact, current models cannot reliably reproduce carbon and nutrient storage and fluxes when soils are disturbed by land use changes or environmental fluctuations (especially of soil moisture).

To address these urgent challenges and improve predictability of carbon and nutrient cycling, I propose a novel theory based on the premise that microbial use of soil resources is optimized by natural selection. This approach will provide a holistic explanation of microbial processes and yield models that are more reliable than traditional ones because they account for microbial adaptation. After testing this optimality hypothesis, I will answer the broader and globally relevant question – are land use and climatic changes increasing retention or loss of soil carbon and nutrients?

The project will achieve four objectives:
1) Determine the optimal strategies of resource use by soil microbes
2) Fill knowledge gaps on microbial processes by constructing new databases
3) Test the optimality theory using the new databases
4) Integrate the optimality theory into a land surface model to scale up results and assess impacts of land use and climatic (specifically hydrologic) changes on carbon and nutrient storage and fluxes

These theoretical advances will spur a new generation of soil models that translate the outcomes of natural selection into reliable predictions of land use and climate change effects on global ecosystems.

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Keywords

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Programme(s)

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Topic(s)

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Funding Scheme

Funding scheme (or “Type of Action”) inside a programme with common features. It specifies: the scope of what is funded; the reimbursement rate; specific evaluation criteria to qualify for funding; and the use of simplified forms of costs like lump sums.

ERC-COG - Consolidator Grant

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Call for proposal

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(opens in new window) ERC-2020-COG

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Host institution

STOCKHOLMS UNIVERSITET
Net EU contribution

Net EU financial contribution. The sum of money that the participant receives, deducted by the EU contribution to its linked third party. It considers the distribution of the EU financial contribution between direct beneficiaries of the project and other types of participants, like third-party participants.

€ 1 688 250,00
Address
UNIVERSITETSVAGEN 10
10691 Stockholm
Sweden

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Region
Östra Sverige Stockholm Stockholms län
Activity type
Higher or Secondary Education Establishments
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Total cost

The total costs incurred by this organisation to participate in the project, including direct and indirect costs. This amount is a subset of the overall project budget.

€ 1 688 250,00

Beneficiaries (1)

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