Structure/Function Realtionships of Soil Microbial Communities
in Primary and Secondary Forests on the Atlantic Plateau near Sao Paulo, BrazilThe Atlantic
Rainforest, known as Mata
Atlantica, is in the hilly region on the Atlantic Plateau near Sao
Paulo and
has been disturbed over the past several centuries by settlement and
farming. As a result, only small
fragments of primary forest remain.
Many of the deforested areas have been converted to agricultural
land. Such extreme anthropogenic
disturbance might have had significant impact on the diversity and
function of
the soil microbial community. It is
estimated that the emission of N2O from tropical forest
soils
accounts for 20-50% of all global sources.
Thus, the potential of this impacted terrestrial ecosystem to
produce
the greenhouse gas N2O might be important to the current and
future
global greenhouse gas budget. The main
objectives of this project are to evaluate both the bacterial and
fungal
communities of these soils and to characterize that fraction of the
community
that is responsible for the production of N2O.
Both molecular and classic approaches are
integrated in the project.
