Project
Soil protists and plants: who is in control?
Higher biodiversity is known to provide a higher ecosystem functioning, known as the biodiversity-ecosystem functioning (BEF) concept, but how is that relationship in soils?
Introduction
It remains unknown if a higher soil diversity will affect ecosystem functions such as plant performance or nutrient cycling. It also remains unknown how global change drivers such as temperature or drought affect this relationship. We address these research questions by examining plant-protist interactions at different diversity levels and under different environmental conditions.
Project description
Starting with a Veni project (Jan 2018 until Dec 2021), we investigated how soil biodiversity links with successional stages (early and mid-succession). We are now extending this work by zooming into the importance of soil biodiversity for plant performance and nutrient cycling. More specifically, we are creating synthetic microbial communities in which protists are the puppet masters, with varying protist diversity to so far 40 species (more to come). We are manipulating these microbial communities with various members including protists, bacteria, fungi, and even plant parasitic nematodes, with also changing their abiotic surrounding such as with increased nitrogen additions and drought stress!
To disentangle the importanceof protists within the soil microbiome and better understand soil biodiversity in general, we collaborate with other scientists at the NIOO WUR, Utrecht University, Radboud University (Nijmegen), and the Royal Botanical Garden (RJB; Madrid, Spain) including Wim van der Putten, Yaun Hautier, Bjorn Robroek or Enrique Lara. Also, other partners within Nematology are jumping on the BEF-bandwagon!
Selected Outcomes
S. Geisen, R. Heinen, E. Andreou, T. van Lent, F. C. Ten Hooven and M. P. Thakur 2022 Contrasting effects of soil microbial interactions on growth-defence relationships between early- and mid-successional plant communities. New Phytologist 233, 1345-1357.
Berlinches de Gea, A., Hautier, Y. & Geisen, S. (2023). Interactive effects of global change drivers as determinants of the link between soil biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Glob Chang Biol, 29, 296-307.