CAREER: Regional control of local functions: Dispersal and the biodiversity-ecosystem function relationship

Biological diversity has the potential to maintain healthy ecosystems. Multiple species work together to recycle nutrients, detoxify water and soils, and maintain water availability. It is important to understand how species contribute to these functions if we want to maintain healthy ecosystems.

While dispersal is an important element of how species live in nature, it is unclear how dispersal processes influence ecosystems. Plants, animals and microbes can move across the landscape and colonize existing and new habitats. This project investigates how colonization influences biological diversity and function.

Specifically, this research focuses on carnivorous plants that capture insects yet depend on their microbial communities to access the nutrients. How do these plants maintain this digestive function despite receiving different microbial colonists? First, the researchers will determine differences in the plant’s microbes along the West and East coast of the US.

Then, they will use experiments to establish whether the microbe’s ability to recycle nutrients for the plant depends on dispersal and colonization. Results from this research will inform how to manage biodiversity and function while considering dispersal. These findings may have major societal impacts by informing how to maintain ecosystem functions critical for life on planet Earth.

Additionally, this work will advance our understanding of the microbiome and its role in human health and agriculture. This project will support training for students at a Hispanic Serving Institution who will gain skills in methods relevant for careers in ecology and biotechnology.

The shape of the biodiversity-ecosystem function relationship remains a lingering question in ecology. As a result, it is still challenging to predict how the ecosystems will respond to environmental change and habitat loss, and how we should manage biodiversity to optimize functioning. This proposal will investigate the causes of colonist functional diversity and its consequences for ecosystem function.

Traditionally overlooked, the number and type of colonists may hold the key to understanding variation in ecosystem function rates of communities interconnected by dispersal. Colonization can contribute functional species that were absent from a site or non-functional species that consume resources and impede community function. Specifically, it will explore how environmental factors generate functional diversity in colonist pools, and whether these colonist pools mediate the effect of (1) distance between communities, (2) dispersal rates and (3) habitat filters on diversity-ecosystem function relationships.

This project will focus on the degradative function of microbial communities associated with the carnivorous pitcher plants Darlingtonia californica and Sarracenia purpurea. These natural microcosms have distinct colonist pools along their geographic ranges and tractable degradative functions. This project will use a combination of field sampling and microcosm experiments to investigate microbial communities within pitcher plants.

The microbial communities and their functions will be profiled using amplicon sequencing, metagenomics and degradation assays. Specifically, this research will establish the role of colonist pools and habitat filters in driving ecosystem function. Additionally, this CAREER project includes educational efforts such as (1) developing inquiry-based activities in two undergraduate courses, (2) cultivating and evaluating explicit mentoring plans for students in research labs, and (3) founding a Biological Sciences Bioinformatics Group.

Overall, the work described here will lead to a better understanding of the role of dispersal in community function and contribute to training of a diverse next-generation of scientists specializing in ecology, molecular biology and bioinformatics

This award reflects NSF's statutory mission and has been deemed worthy of support through evaluation using the Foundation's intellectual merit and broader impacts review criteria.