Changes in the Soil Metabolic Complexity Driven by Plant Succession at the Landscape Evolutionary Observatory at Biosphere2
Abstract
Terraformation defined as the transformation of ecosystems or landscapes to enable them to be hospitable to some given class of life forms or in other words primary succession has long been linked mainly to soil formation. Yet subsurface components such as microbial organisms, plant roots, and metabolites have not been included in landscape research until recently. Interestingly, microbial communities are the first to colonize newly formed landscapes such as basalt and they are crucial for mineral soil fertility, carbon, and nitrogen fixation and therefore plant growth. Consequently, understanding the role of microbial organisms and their metabolites is essential for understanding primary succession. In this project, we aimed to understand how biological succession - from microbial colonization to the formation of non-vascular plants like moss, to the vascular plants - interacts with and drives associated hydrological and geochemical transformations through the use of metabolomics and multi omics integration. Here we used LCMS-MS to characterize the metabolic profiles of 3 different types of samples: bare soil, crust and moss, collected from Landscape Evolution Observatory (LEO) at Biosphere 2. Our results revealed an increase in metabolic complexity along the biological succession with significant implication for ecosystem stability in the context of environmental changes.
- Publication:
-
AGU Fall Meeting Abstracts
- Pub Date:
- December 2022
- Bibcode:
- 2022AGUFM.B25H1630M