MICROSERVICES

Climate change exerts substantial pressure on Earth?s biodiversity and the multitude of ecosystems services it provides. This is particularly problematic for agroecosystems, where the accelerated pace of climate change and its multi-level interactions with other drivers such as unsustainable land use, directly threatens global food production in the context of a growing population. The Sustainable Development Goals and Aichi Biodiversity Targets from the Strategic Plan for Biodiversity 2011-2020, aiming at quantifying and mitigating the impact of climate change and unsustainable management on biodiversity in agroecosystems, are not on track to be achieved in the near future. One way to assist in achieving these goals is to maximize utilization of microbial functions, i.e. those that are enhancing crop growth, nutrient use efficiency, abiotic stress resilience, and disease resistance, into agricultural production, while progressively decreasing the amount of chemical external inputs such a fertilizers and pesticides. However, the relevance of microbial diversity is underrepresented in ongoing debates on climate change, global biodiversity loss and conservation policy, and the consequences of climate change for microbial diversity and the ecosystem services delivered by this diversity are not well understood. The proposed project MICROSERVICES aims at using a multi-domain approach to assess the impact of climate change on the crop microbiome and associated ecosystem functions under various agricultural management regimes and increase our capacity to predict future impacts of climate change on soil biodiversity and the cascading effects on ecosystem multifunctionality in agroecosystems. For this purpose, shifts in microbial diversity, crop-microbiome interactions, and associated ecosystem multifunctionality will be assessed both 1) along natural European climate gradients across management regimes with forecasted climate progressions into the future as well as 2) using an in-situ field-scale manipulation experiment to simulate drought under different conventional and organic management practices. Regional climate models informed by Earth Observation data coupled with machine learning algorithms will be employed to find deep correlations across this multi-level datasets and make predictions on the consequences under future climate scenarios. MICROSERVICES will support the current strategic plans by 1) providing scientific evidence on future climate change impacts on microbial diversity and associated ecosystem services, 2) raise political and public awareness of the importance of microbial diversity for sustainable agricultural production under future climates, and 3) foster interactions among research entities, agricultural stakeholders and policy makers to introduce soil microbial diversity in ongoing policy debates on climate action (post Paris Agreement) and biodiversity protection (post-2020 Global Biodiversity Framework).