USAP-DC

As climate change progresses, it is activating both master switches of microbial activity simultaneously: moisture and temperature. In soils, microbes serve critical ecosystem services including nutrient cycling and carbon sequestration. The fact that we do not fully understand how microbes act on carbon pools in soils and how these will change with the rapidly changing climate is extremely worrisome. Here we propose to tackle this question by initiating an interdisciplinary action studying the soils of the Colombian Páramos. The Páramos are a unique high-altitude hotspot of biodiversity in the Andes that render critical ecosystem services, including water capture and carbon sequestration. If the hydrology of the system has gained a lot of attention over the past few years, the fate of the extensive pools of organic carbon in these vast peatlands has remained unexplored. The unique geographic situation of the cold and humid Páramos being already on the edge of their geo-climatic range provides us with an unparalleled opportunity to study a soil microbial community from carbon-rich soils that are extremely vulnerable to both the raise in temperature and decrease of moisture that will impact soils around the globe as climate change progresses. Our project aims at starting to address the need to disentangle the effect of moisture and temperature on the activity and composition of the microbial communities controlling the fate of organic carbon in soils (Objective 1), while assembling an international team of experts capable of scaling up the understanding of these processes at the landscape and regional level by integrating the functioning of the belowground microbial community with the above-ground vegetation (Objective 2).

Person	Role
Couradeau, Estelle	Investigator and contact
Maximova, Siela	Co-Investigator
Machado, Jose Luis	Investigator and contact
Santamaria Vanegas, Johanna	Researcher

Antarctic Organisms and Ecosystems

Award # 2325922

USAP-None_1
USAP-2325922_1

None in the Database