Agathe Chave (IBENS)
Soils play a major role in global carbon cycling, with microbial decomposition of soil organic matter representing a major pathway of terrestrial carbon and methane emissions to the atmosphere. In most of the mathematical and computational models that already exist, many characteristics of soil microbial communities, including their spatially heterogeneous structure and ability to go dormant, are often neglected, leading to more tractable but less comprehensive models. In my work, spatial structure and dormancy have been explicitly modelled to estimate their impact on soil ecosystems and carbon emissions. Using a novel spatial adaptive dynamics model, the responses of microbial resource uptake to changing temperatures were estimated for upper and lower soil layers, highlighting a strong correlation between microbial clustering and levels of carbon and methane emissions. In addition, through the Generalized Lotka-Volterra multi-species modelling approach, microbial dormancy was shown to have complex, non-trivial effects on community diversity patterns, depending on the type of dormancy and environment.
Lieu
à BioSP