Location: Grassland Soil and Water Research Laboratory
Project Number: 3098-21600-001-068-N
Project Type: Non-Funded Cooperative Agreement
Start Date: Jan 15, 2022
End Date: Jul 31, 2025
Objective:
- Establish common gardens of clonally replicated switchgrass genotypes to study ecotype divergence, local adaptation, and the spatial scale of genome-by-environment interaction across broad environmental gradients (e.g., precipitation, temperature, and soils).
- Identify genomic regions underlying adaptation and sustainability in switchgrass using genomewide associations.
- Investigate key switchgrass traits (resource use efficiency, drought tolerance, growing season phenology, freezing tolerance, tissue characteristics, and root system attributes) in climate adaptation and sustainability of switchgrass feedstock production.
- Characterize the relative roles of switchgrass genotype and local environments in the assembly of the switchgrass bacterial and fungal microbiome communities in natural habitats.
- Evaluate impacts of switchgrass productivity and microbiome diversity on ecosystem processes (C and N cycling, soil-water balance, greenhouse gas emissions) across continental scale environmental gradients.
- Use multi-scale modelling to predict switchgrass performance and sustainability under future climate change. Incorporate plant-microbiome-soil interactions by modeling feedback and feedforward loops generated by belowground ecosystem processes. Constrain modeling parameters by empirically measured ecosystem processes across broad environmental gradients and make predictions for future evaluation.
Approach:
- Establish common gardens to study ecotype divergence, local adaptation, and the spatial scale of genome-by-environment interaction across broad environmental gradients. Identify genomic regions underlying adaptation and sustainability in switchgrass using genomewide associations.
- Investigate key switchgrass traits related to climate adaptation and sustainability (i.e., resource use efficiency, drought tolerance, growing season phenology, freezing tolerance, tissue characteristics, and root system attributes).
- Characterize the relative role of switchgrass genotype and local environments in the assembly of the switchgrass bacterial and fungal microbome communities in natural habitats.
- Evaluate impacts of switchgrass productivity and microbiome diversity on ecosystem processes (C and N cycling, soil-water balance, greenhouse gas emissions) across continental scale environmental gradients.
- Use process based modelling to predict switchgrass performance and sustainability across broad continental scale environmental gradients and under future climate change.
- Incorporate plant-microbiome-soil interactions by modeling feedback and feedforward loops generated by belowground ecosystem processes – constrain modeling parameters by empirically measured ecosystem processes across and make predictions for future evaluation.
