Biodiversity Research Seminar Series (BRS)
BRS Jennifer Bhatnagar: “Fungi and climate change”
March 6, 2024, 12:00 pm to 1:00 pm
Zoom webinar recording link:
Passcode: this recording is only available for members of the UBC Biodiversity Research Centre community. Please contact Katie Beall for access (Katie.Beall@ubc.ca)
host: Jason Pither
Title: “Fungi and climate change”
Abstract:
Fungi are a megadiverse group of organisms that drive carbon (C) and nutrient cycling through ecosystems through their activity as decomposers, symbionts, and pathogens. Over the last decade, advances in molecular technologies have enabled exploration of the ecological, evolutionary, and biochemical mechanisms that fungi use to control these large-scale processes in situ and how they are modified by global change. This talk will describe key aspects of fungal communities that predict their activity in soils and the unexpected processes by which they do it. I will also describe what we know about climate change impacts on fungal activity in nature and new research on how climate change shifts interactions between fungi and resources that feed back to control the exchange of energy and nutrients between the biosphere and the atmosphere.