Do mountain plant responses to climate change depend on microbial mutualists?

Plant interactions with microbial mutualists are critical for plant growth, with mutualists enhancing plant access to essential nutrients and ameliorating the effects of stressful environmental conditions such as extreme temperatures and drought. As a result, microbial mutualists may play an important role in mediating plant responses to changing climates.

The goal of this project is to elucidate how interactions with microbial mutualists shape plant distributions and communities in response to climate change in mountain grassland habitats.

My project builds on recent advances in monitoring techniques like eDNA metabarcoding to characterize microbial communities at large scales, allowing for detection of patterns in the relationships between environmental drivers, plant community composition, and microbial mutualist communities.

The novelty of this project lies in the combination of this type of data with an experiment manipulating microbial mutualists, which is essential for identifying the causes underlying observed patterns.

Specifically, I aim to (1) determine variation in plant species responsiveness to mutualists with and without drought stress, (2) examine whether mutualist-responsiveness predicts plant distribution responses to drier, warmer climates, and (3) model both direct effects of climate on plant community structure and indirect effects via microbial mutualist communities that are affected by climate and interact with plant communities.

In addition to advancing our understanding of how microbial mutualists shape plant communities, this project will facilitate knowledge transfer between me and my host institution.

I will receive training in research areas such as advanced statistical modelling and eDNA metabarcoding techniques and analyses, while sharing my expertise in the ecology of plant-microbial mutualist interactions.