This award will partially support students to participate in a workshop aimed at scaling belowground processes to larger spatial and temporal realms. The workshop is primarily supported by the Department of Energy and will include approximately 25 speakers from as far away as Australia, China and Europe. Speakers will address both empirical studies and modeling of roots and belowground processes and part of the goal is to bring these two groups together to improve terrestrial carbon cycle models in the context of climatic change. Moreover, the influence of climatic change on soil carbon fluxes, on which roots have a major influence, is one of the greatest uncertainties in terrestrial ecosystem models. Students will participate in several ways. In most sessions, slots are reserved for a graduate student to speak; invitations will result from a competition of abstract submissions. Strong abstracts not chosen for oral presentation and that help balance workshop subject areas will be chosen for posters. This proposal leverages other support by providing an opportunity for 10 graduate students to participate either in oral or poster presentations. Students also will be included in small breakout groups that will enable them to interact closely with leaders in the field and provide fresh perspectives to perplexing areas in ecosystem ecology. The workshop opportunities will be advertised openly on listserves and also at the participating universities.
This workshop will provide opportunities for 10 students to interact with leaders in the fields of ecosystem, landscape and global modeling science, along with root, microbial and soil ecologists. Students will experience firsthand how interdisciplinary science is conducted and play key roles in discussions of new directions for scientific inquiry.
Workshop on Scaling Root Processes: Global Impacts This grant allowed students to attend a primarily U.S. Department of Energy-sponsored workshop. Goals of the workshop were to identify how root and root-associated processes can improve the predictive capability of current system models of carbon cycling; to identify where research is needed in root biology for improving models and addressing programmatic goals; and to identify what new approaches and technologies are needed to improve fundamental understanding and model parameterization of root processes. The workshop brought together a diverse community of scientists that were leaders in the field with interest in the processes and modeling of root ecology. With NSF support, we were able to bring 12 graduate students and postdoctoral fellows to join in the workshop. Participants identified the state of the science in the understanding and modeling of critical root ecological processes; gaps and/or deficiencies in current process knowledge and model representations; and a path forward to provide the necessary process understanding/observations and model improvements to robustly incorporate root dynamics and plant-soil-microbe continuum processes into models, particularly Earth System Models. From an educational perspective, this was an outstanding opportunity to include young scientists in a small group setting where they could brainstorm on ways to better predict how global change might influence the belowground component of terrestrial ecosystems. They were uniformly delighted with the opportunity to participate in the workshop. Approximately half of the supported students are submitting papers for a special issue on root processes in the journal, The New Phytologist.
