Increasing environmental variability will increase drought in many regions. Agricultural systems are already responding to increased drought through human decisions, such as the installation of irrigation systems, and through changes in the diverse microbial communities that inhabit agricultural soils. In some cases, microbial responses to drought might protect plants from drought, reducing the need for farmers to respond. Reciprocally, human decisions, such as deciding to irrigate or installing cover crops, might affect microbial communities and the ability of those microbes to protect crops from drought. Interestingly, different human decisions are likely to have different effects. Irrigation might actually cause microbial communities to become less protective to plants, while practices that increase soil health (e.g., cover cropping or crop rotation) might promote the ability of microbes to protect plants from drought. As a result, irrigation has the potential to generate feedbacks that reduce the power of microbes to protect plants from drought and instead increase reliance on irrigation. In contrast, practices that promote soil health have the potential to increase protective microbial communities and cause feedbacks that increase long-term resilience. It is unclear, however, when such feedbacks are likely to develop, which agronomic management strategies or soil characteristics will prevent or promote such feedbacks and how farmers will respond to knowledge of the benefits provided by their microbial communities. The research team will test how both farmers and microbes respond to drought, how farmer decisions influence microbial communities, and how microbial communities and the potential drought tolerance they provide might protect farmers from climate change and influence farmer management decisions. The research has direct societal benefit through improving agricultural practices. The resulting data along with suggested strategies for promoting the capacity of microbes to protect their farms from drought will be shared with the team's partner farmers. The team also will communicate their findings to rural audiences more broadly through public exhibits presented at state fairs and local museums. Finally, the research team will share strategies for integrating social science and biological data with other researchers by hosting a workshop and will contribute to the training of the next generation of scientists through mentorship of post-doctoral scholars, graduate students, and undergraduate students.
The investigators will use the concept of adaptation to bridge social science and ecological research to investigate how both human decisions and microbial communities influence resilience to drought and how social and ecological domains coevolve overtime, toward greater or reduced long-term resilience of desirable ecosystem functions. The research combines evolutionary theory and trait-based approaches in community ecology to predict when microbial communities will change in ways that promote ecological adaptation and plant resilience to drought, and they draw from past sociological findings, decision-making models and path-dependency theory to predict human adaptation and when farmers are most likely to pursue management that influences both short- and long-term resilience of crop yields. The researchers test these predictions by combining farmer surveys and interviews with experiments testing the capacity for microorganisms to protect crops from drought stress to explore human adaptation, ecological adaptation, and the resulting socio-ecological interactions and feedbacks.
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.
