Kolloquium: Lisa Wingate

When organisms such as bacteria, fungi and plants are assembled into communities, they exert a profound effect on the chemical composition of the atmosphere and modify climate at the Earth’s surface. This is because their diverse metabolisms drive crucial processes related to primary productivity, organic matter decomposition and nutrient cycling. However, modelling and scaling plant and microbial metabolism to the globe whilst predicting the function of ecosystems to climate change is an enormous scientific and societal challenge. In this talk I will present some examples of how measuring processes and patterns in plant and soil communities using multiple independent but mechanistically related datasets can provide deep insights on their metabolism, ecology and evolution as well as providing constraints on estimates of the CO2 sink strength of the terrestrial biosphere. I will also share some thoughts on the future potential of -omics observations to obtain a deeper understanding of ecosystem function and improve the predictive modelling of key Earth system processes at large scales.

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