Many microbial and tree species have evolved to be resilient to wildfire. Still, some forests struggle to recover. Some University of Idaho researchers were awarded a federal grant to study how climate change affects the relationship between the smallest organisms and their surrounding ecosystems.
Tara Hudiburg has spent most of her career studying how drought and wildfire affect how trees store carbon. She’s a professor of rangeland and fire sciences at the University of Idaho. But she says she increasingly became curious about the role of tiny fungi and bacteria in the trees.
“Trees feed microbes sugars at their roots, and the microbes use that as their carbon source," she said. "Then, as they metabolize that organic matter, they release nitrogen, and that's a nitrogen source for the trees.”
The desire to learn more about this relationship led her to team up with microbiologists on a new project called EMBER — Embedding Molecular Biology in Ecosystem Research — which was recently awarded a $15 million grant from the National Science Foundation. It’s all about figuring out how to help forests survive.
“If they don't keep functioning on a planetary scale and keep absorbing the amount of CO2 at the scale that they have been to date, then we have a bigger problem to solve," Hudiburg said.
Part of the project will involve depriving an experimental forest of water and snow for three years, setting it on fire, and then studying how everything from the treetops to the microbes in the roots responds.
EMBER also includes a partnership with the Coeur d'Alene Tribe to set up an Indigenous Innovation Lab. Through this lab, tribal members will lead research on quantifying the effects of cultural burns, among other projects.
Find reporter Rachel Cohen on X @racheld_cohen
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