Tropical forests are the largest reservoirs of biodiversity on Earth and are under great threat due to deforestation. This project addresses the critically important question of how microbial biodiversity responds to and recovers from deforestation. Microorganisms are regarded as drivers of ecosystem processes and have not been characterized as extensively as plants and animals. The US-Brazil research team will focus on the potent green house gas methane and identify the producers and consumers along gradients of land use in the Amazon rainforest. The educational efforts for this project will build relationships between K-12 students in Brazil and US for biological conservation through live video conferences for training of undergraduate students and research mentoring of graduate students and postdoctoral associates. The microbial studies have important conservation and technological implications for forest management.
Direct and real time measurements of the methane gas in the soil-atmosphere interface will be combined with a targeted high throughput nucleic acid sequencing of microbes involved in the cycling of methane to assess their genetic, phylogenetic, and functional dimensions in two different regions of the Amazon rainforest. This work will result in the most extensive survey to date of the microbial diversity of any tropical ecosystem, the most comprehensive study of microbial responses to land use change ever documented, and the development of a novel approach for the integration of microbial biodiversity, allowing for accurate prediction of the effects of deforestation on the methane cycle.
