Objective
Understanding how species mediate ecosystem processes, such as energy and nutrient fluxes, is among the foremost challenges in ecology. Bacterial communities are pivotal for the functioning of the world’s ecosystems. Although there have been great advances in describing the biodiversity of bacteria, little effort has been directed at understanding how differences in bacterial communities translate into differences in ecosystem functioning. The proposed research will develop a comprehensive framework to determine how bacterial species affect functioning while in complex mixtures of species. Once this baseline is obtained, it is possible to ask detailed questions about the ‘functional ecology’ of bacterial communities. Foremost among these is whether ecological processes (species sorting) are more important than evolutionary processes (adaptation) in establishing species roles in ecosystems. The research has implications for the fundamental understanding how ecological communities operate.
Fields of science (EuroSciVoc)
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
CORDIS classifies projects with EuroSciVoc, a multilingual taxonomy of fields of science, through a semi-automatic process based on NLP techniques.
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesmicrobiologybacteriology
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesevolutionary biology
- natural sciencesbiological sciencesecologyecosystems
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Call for proposal
ERC-2012-StG_20111109
See other projects for this call
Funding Scheme
ERC-SG - ERC Starting GrantHost institution
SW7 2AZ LONDON
United Kingdom