Microbial Data Synthesis and Meta-analysis for the Biodiversity Exploratories

• Applicants: Professor Dr. Michael Bonkowski; Professor Dr. Francois Buscot; Professor Dr. Rolf Daniel; Professorin Dr. Ellen Kandeler; Professor Dr. Jörg Overmann
• Subject Area: Microbial Ecology and Applied Microbiology
• Term: from 2014 to 2020
• Project identifier: Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 252263987

In its first funding phase, the microbial synthesis project MicroSYSteM has focused on the theory-based development of new analysis strategies for the synthesis of heterogeneous but complementary data sets from the Exploratories. This has resulted in novel tools for interaction modelling and microbial niche modelling that were applied to real-world data from the Exploratories and yielded a considerable body of results. Future work will advance microbial data synthesis and modeling by analysing microbial niches with respect to spatiotemporal heterogeneity and organic matter quality. The interaction models developed in the first funding phase will be expanded and applied to soil communities of different organismal complexity. The results obtained through microbial niche analysis and interaction modeling using Exploratory data will subsequently be fed into the existing tools of Turing´s theory, dynamical structure equation modelling, and Price equation in order to address ecologically relevant questions such as spatiotemporal dynamics at the microscale level or the dynamics of changes in community structure, like the resilience to environmental perturbations caused by changes in land use intensities. Finally, the results obtained from the proposed belowground analysis and modelling synthesis will feed into a large-scale synthesis with data from aboveground communities of the Exploratories.

• DFG Programme: Infrastructure Priority Programmes
• Subproject of: SPP 1374: Biodiversity Exploratories