Ph.D. on Effects of warming, elevated CO2 and drought on soil bacterial and archaeal community structure.

This Ph.D. project was started March 2010 with Ph.D. -student Lasse Bergmark. The project is rooted in WP3.2 (Soil fauna community).

Project
Long-term climatic changes may affect the diversity and functioning of soil prokaryotes and thereby ecosystem functioning, but little is known about the responses of soil prokaryotes to the interactions between the main climate change factors i.e. enhanced CO2 concentration, elevated temperature and changed precipitation patterns. The project aims to test the effects of global warming on nitrifiers and denitrifiers. The responses of soil bacteria and archaea to combinations of climate changes are a result of complex interactions and are not additive by investigating prokaryotic community composition using pyrosequencing techniques, qPCR and assays of prokaryotic enzyme activity related to inorganic nitrogen turnover (i.e. nitrification, denitrification and nitrous oxide reductase activity). The main objective will be to develop and implement pyrosequencing methods for studying the composition of prokaryotic communities involved in denitrification and nitrification.