Understanding how biological systems interact with and influence one another over time is a Grand Challenge of Biology. Resolving this challenge is essential to predicting ecosystem responses to changing conditions to inform human action and policy. Yet understanding has been hampered because the Biological research community spans many sub-fields, each with its own perspectives, approaches, and focus, and with little exposure to one another. The EMergent Ecosystem Responses to ChanGE Biology Integration Institute (EMERGE BII) will integrate insights across Biochemistry, Genetics, Molecular Biology, Physiology, Ecology, Evolution, and Ecosystem Science to develop a comprehensive framework for these dynamic interactions. Leveraging the power of 14 organizations and 15 scientific subdisciplines, EMERGE integrates research and training, field observations and laboratory experiments, and novel measurements at unprecedented resolution, to understand a climate-critical case study: how a rapidly warming Arctic is transforming permafrost into wetlands, accelerating cycling of carbon, and further affecting earth's climate. EMERGE will train a new generation of integrative biologists through a program of research exchanges, a Summer Institute and an undergraduate research program. To further extend its impact, EMERGE will communicate its work to the public and the scientific community through such activities as a TEDx-style event and development of high school Integrative Biology Workshops. Collectively, the EMERGE BII’s discoveries, tools, and cutting-edge trainees will help society to respond to, and manage, changing biological systems.
The EMERGE BII leverages a decade of integrated system characterization of a thawing permafrost peatland to produce a framework for evaluating multi-level responses to changes in natural and engineered ecosystems. This framework integrates and expands upon genes-to-ecosystems understanding via new measurements to increase phylogenetic breadth and resolution of microbes (strain-resolved metagenomics and metatranscriptomics), viruses (dsDNA, ssDNA, RNA), and mobile elements (plasmids, introns, and diversity generating retro-elements), to study interactions among them and with the ecosystem. The study then completes the loop to assess how changing ecosystems in turn impact communities, populations, and genes, via processes of acclimation, assembly and adaptation. A decade of field observations of microbial populations and communities at different thaw stages will be complemented by newly-enabled strain-resolved analyses of adaptation signatures, while perturbation experiments will characterize how microbes in complex communities acclimate to change. These genes-to-ecosystems-to-genes measurements, many of which will be firsts for natural communities, will be coupled to extensive biogeochemical and ecosystem measurements to assess their influence on system outputs, and to develop predictive models of community- (BioCrunch) and landscape- (ecosys) scale processes. This project will improve understanding of how thawing permafrost systems respond to and cause changes, with a focus on carbon cycling. The resultant framework will provide a foundation for assessing microbial change in other systems, like the National Science Foundation’s Long-term Ecological Research sites and National Ecological Observatory Network, where such highly resolved systems-level data are increasingly being collected.
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.
