Project Details
Projekt
The novel Grit Crust: Taxonomy and Recovery of Atacama’s Dark Life (GRIT LIFE)
Applicant
Dr. Patrick Jung
Subject Area
Ecology and Biodiversity of Plants and Ecosystems
Physical Geography
Physical Geography
Term
from 2021 to 2024
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 455698839
In non-vegetated landscapes, such as deserts, biological crusts, which are an association between mainly photoautotrophic microorganisms and inorganic soil particles, are the pioneer communities that form the basis for further ecosystem development. These “biocrusts” contribute to a significant proportion to carbon and nitrogen fluxes and affect ecosystem functions and properties such as water retention, carbon budget and disturbance response.Recently, a new biocrust-biocenosis has been discovered at the coastal Atacama Desert in Chile. It represents a transitional stage between a biological soil crust and a saxicolous community growing on grit out of granitoid quartz. In contrast to other arid biocrusts, this novel “grit crust” covers and affects large areas along the coastal belt in Chile. However, its composition, physiology and spatio-temporal occurrence are not yet understood. Moreover, the challenges to resolve the taxonomically complex microbial communities, their interactions with the given climatic situation, where mainly fog water fuels the photosynthetic activity, and finally the extension of the grit crust on a large landscape scale, urge for a multidisciplinary approach.The overarching goal of this proposal “GRIT LIFE” is to understand the to date unknown ecology and distribution of the novel grit crust in the National Park Pan de Azúcar (Atacama, Chile) which is supposed to be the result of unique abiotic and biotic interaction dynamics. Within an interdisciplinary consortium encompassing four sub-projects (SP) three central hypotheses shall be tested regarding a) taxonomic composition and microclimate, b) recolonization, and c) contribution to carbon cycle. To achieve this, modern sensing technologies will be combined with field sampling and eco-physiological measuring to train machine learning statistical models. Those models will then be applied to remotely sensed data to provide spatially explicit estimations of ecosystem services provided by the novel grit crust.Specifically, in this sub-project D (SP-D, PI Jung) the taxonomic composition including the role of parasitic fungi and the recovery of the grit crust community will be studied during a recolonization experiment. This approach will test a) how and if the community compositions of the grit crust are affected by micro-climate, b) if the blackish and whitish pattern is the consequence of abiotic (climatic) or biotic (parasitic fungi) effects and finally c) how the organismic community reacts during a recolonization experiment. Detailed information of the species composition as well as functional proxies (SP-D, PI Jung), the ecophysiological response with respect to local exposition and abiotic conditions (this SP-C), the climatic conditions (SP-B, PI Bendix) and the spatio-temporal grit cover derived from remote sensing data (SP-A, PI Lehnert) will finally be combined and modeled to provide spatial quantifications of several ecosystem services.
DFG Programme
Research Grants
