Remote Sensing of Microbial Metabolism from Genomes to Ecosystems

Remote sensing capabilities have revolutionized several fields including geology and vegetation ecology. With these new capabilities to observe important interactions between subsurface hydrobiogeochemical properties and surface biological response, there is vast potential to rigorously test theories of ecosystem function and evolution. For example, the functional trait distributions of plants can be quantified at increasingly broader scales allowing ecological theories to be tested across plots to watersheds and beyond. Geophysical methods now allow us to interrogate how regolith properties vary across the same scales and provide an insight into the factors regulating plant species composition and functional trait distributions. Given the fundamental constraints of water, energy and nutrients are shared across biology, and that plants and microorganisms share a long history of coevolution, it is likely that microbial functional traits distributions follow similarly interpretable and predictable patterns at ecosystem scales. In this presentation I will cover our work combining theory, observation and modeling to advance how microbial traits are deciphered from genomic information, as well as approaches to ground truth these hypotheses. I will also discuss how we combine various sensing approaches, including vegetation, geophysical, and microbial to evaluate patterns of co-evolution across a watershed with consequences for ecosystem hydrobiogeochemistry.