NSF CAREER award to fund "Feedbacks from drought on the phytochemical landscape"
New NSF CAREER award to expand our studies of plant chemistry under drought
A recent hypothesis (“the phytochemical landscape”) proposed that plant chemistry is central to both food webs and nutrient cycles—a window through which we might understand variation in interactions between organisms and their environment, and the consequences of such variation for ecosystems.
“The experiments in this project will examine how increasing drought will affect the diversity, composition, and function of Great Basin ecosystems, and whether we can predict some of these effects through a better understanding of plant chemistry.”
The project will test this phytochemical-landscape hypothesis in the 21st century in the face of hugely disruptive human-driven global change. Here in the West, this change includes persistent and severe drought, caused by rising temperatures and erratic rainfall and snowfall. Our prior work has shown that plant chemistry has been shaped by historic climatic conditions in the Great Basin and that the chemistry of individual plants changes in response to drought. Interestingly, the more severe the drought and/or the more other stress that plants experience simultaneously (for example, drought combined with damage from plant-eating insects), the less variable the chemistry of plant individuals appears to be. In the work supported by the CAREER award, we will investigate: (i) whether these effects of severe drought extend to entire plant communities, utilizing rainfall-exclusion and rainfall-addition experiments in mid-elevation sagebrush ecosystems; and (ii) whether these effects feed back to changes in plant-animal interactions and soil carbon cycling. In so doing, we will develop a robust program of research projects for undergraduate students in collaboration with the McNair Scholars Program and UNR’s Office of Undergraduate Research, and we will collaborate with Sierra Nevada Journeys, a local educational non-profit, to provide outreach to Northern Nevada schoolchildren with the goal of increasing the recruitment of undergraduate students who are first-generation and/or from underrepresented groups into STEM disciplines.