Final Report (Required, .pdf format only) : 

Working Group Final Report

Within the last few years the topic of microbial diversity and its relationship to system function has exploded on the scene of ecology, and many new ideas and advances have come about. We held a session at the last (2007) LTER All-Scientists’ Meeting to address and compare bacteria diversity and dynamics in a range of aquatic and terrestrial soil systems exemplified by LTER Sites. We also formed a Microbial Ecology Working Group A follow-up workshop on cross-site comparisons and integrating LTER studies performed in this area was funded by the LNO and held at MSU on this topic. A closely related workshop was held at LSU the following fall to discuss potentials for microbial ecological studies at NEON sites. Another workshop on this topic and integration with ICoMM efforts in microbial diversity and microbial biogeography is being proposed by Linda Amaral-Zettler for the 2009 ASM meeting.

We propose a workshop for the 2009 ASM focusing on the links between microbially mediated processes and LTER core questions in ecology and geochemistry, emphasizing advances in our understanding of processes affecting production and consumption or greenhouse gases, primarily methane, nitrous oxide and carbon dioxide. We will discuss these advances organized around the following questions: (1) What is our current understanding of factors controlling these fluxes over local to global and synoptic to annual scales? (2) How are these fluxes related to microbial community composition (diversity) and standing crop? (3) What can the rapidly evolving fields of metagenomics and metatranscriptomics tell us about these processes? (4) Can these microbial processes be reliably modeled? (5) Are there fundamental similarities and differences among aquatic vs. soil systems? (6) What general principles can we deduce from answers to these questions? (7) How can developing technologies aid advancement in these areas of research and what does LTER need to do to prepare for the database and bioinformatics requirements they will impose.

We propose an all-day workshop (4 sessions), with the morning 2 sessions devoted to invited and contributed presentations. We will start the afternoon with a plenary session that will inform participants of progress since the last meeting, including reports on the two workshops mentioned above. The rest of the session will be devoted to planning for potential cross-site experiments, a discussion of integrating new technologies with LTER science and we will consider a synthesis paper as a product of the workshop.