Project Details
Projekt
Effects of increasing land-use-intensity on the biodiversity and functions of microeukaryotes and microbial food webs in grasslands (MicroEuk)
Subject Area
Microbial Ecology and Applied Microbiology
Term
since 2026
Project identifier
Deutsche Forschungsgemeinschaft (DFG) - Project number 568897364
The metatranscriptomic data of BE_CENSE provide, for the first time, an unbiased assessment of the entire diversity of microeukaryotes in soils of all grassland EP plots of the Biodiversity Exploratories. We will mainly focus on protists and use trait-based community analyses to link species diversity to ecosystem functioning. Such a holistic approach can provide unique insights into the effects of land-use intensity (LUI) as compared to methodologies that tackle individual taxonomic groups of protists (bacteria, fungi, and nematodes), as emergent properties resulting from biotic interactions between divergent pro- and eukaryotic phyla will be captured within the single comprehensive biodiversity assessment provided by metatranscriptomics. Further, we aim to explore the effects of soil types as environmental filters for protist diversity and functioning and how soil pore space, assessed by X-ray micro-computed tomography, impacts the diversity and functioning of microbial eukaryotes. Overall, we aim to employ co-occurrence network analysis to explore microbial food webs and identify patterns of species interactions. Specifically, we strive to assess the specificity of fungivorous protists, the relative proportions of bacterivorous protists, and the associations of predatory bacteria and fungi with their potential prey organisms in the BE_CENSE data.
DFG Programme
Infrastructure Priority Programmes
Subproject of
SPP 1374:
Biodiversity Exploratories
