Plants have developed multiple strategies to optimize nutrient acquisition from the soil to avoid phosphorus limitation – involving strong competition or tight cooperation with soil microorganisms. Yet, the scarcity of observations and the small scale, where plant-microbe interactions and microbe mediated nutrient cycling are occurring, currently constrains a quantitative upscaling of the prevailing strategies.
Within the SUP:RHIZE project I want to investigate plant and microbial interactions in rhizospheres of a tropical rainforest in Central Amazonia growing on highly weathered and phosphorus depleted soils. Using state-of-the art analytical methods and a combination of field, laboratory and modeling experiments, I aim to disentangle mechanisms that are facilitating phosphorus supply for plants and microbes by:
- inquiring the influence of fine roots on the fate of phosphorus during leaf and root litter decomposition
- identifying major phosphorus fluxes in the soil and characterizing microbial groups being responsible for soil phosphorus mineralization
- tracing the fate of labile plant carbon inputs in the soil and their effect on phosphorus dynamics at the rhizosphere scale in tropical forest soils.
- to estimate C use and C costs that are involved in competition and cooperation between plants and microbes in the rhizosphere.
Links:
- Das Amazon FACE-Projekt: Welchen Einfluss hat Klimawandel auf den Regenwald?
- Funded by the European Commission – REWIRE COFUND program
Collaboration:
- Laynara F. Lugli and C. Alberto Quesada (INPA, Manaus, Brazil) and the AmazonFACE program
- Anja Rammig and Katrin Fleischer at the chair of LSAI (TUM, Freising, Germany).
Investigated by:
