Source: Susan Hubbard and Dan Hawkes
Illustration By: Diana SwantekA growing human population, whose numbers and lifestyles drive an
ever-increasing demand for resources—including clean water, food, and
energy—is reshaping interactions among plants, microbes, and the
environment on a global scale. Because the urgency of developing
scientific approaches to effectively steward our Earth’s resources is
becoming increasingly evident, we must know more about what’s
underground—what earth scientists would call the subsurface. Our present
lack of scientific understanding about the subsurface, and our
corresponding limitations in simulating terrestrial system
biogeochemical behavior, hinders our ability to develop robust solutions
to a variety of DOE mission-relevant challenges, including those
associated with contaminants, carbon cycling, and sustainable biofuel
crops.
Berkeley Lab and the Earth Sciences Division is proud to announce a
substantial effort to rise to these challenges, through a new science
project called the Sustainable Systems Scientific Focus Area 2.0 (the
“SFA 2.0”). The project is newly funded by the DOE Office of Biological and Environmental Research, through the Subsurface Biogeochemistry Program of the Climate and Environmental Science Division. The
project, which will involve over 50 scientists from Berkeley Lab and
other institutions, will develop understanding and simulation
capabilities for predicting the metabolic potential of subsurface
microbiomes and implications for watershed-scale biogeochemical
processes. The goal of this genome-through-watershed-scale project is to
quantify processes and develop simulation capabilities that enable
prediction of how global climate change affects microbially induced
biogeochemical processes within the earth’s subsurface, and the ways
those processes in turn affect biogeochemical cycling relevant to
terrestrial environment feedbacks to climate, contaminant mobility, and
agricultural sustainability. A description of the project is given on
the new SFA 2.0 website.
The SFA 2.0 is broken up into three phases. Phase I launches October 1st, 2013, and will
be primarily conducted at Rifle, CO. The Rifle-based study will be the
first coordinated attempt to quantify the metabolic potential of an
entire subsurface ecosystem, which requires an understanding of the
underlying genetic, biochemical, and physiological bases of microbial
activity in the context of floodplain-wide fluxes and biogeochemical
processes that occur within a heterogeneous aquifer. A key objective of
the first phase of the project will be to demonstrate an approach for
investigating, and a simulation framework for predicting, how
information stored in a genome is translated into microbial and
terrestrial ecosystem processes, and how larger-scale climate and
ecosystem changes can impact smaller-scale biological functioning. As an
analogue for global change, the team will initially focus on how oxygen
and moisture perturbations affect metabolic potential and system
biogeochemical functioning.
The choice of Rifle for Phase I of the SFA 2.0 is no accident. A
former uranium mine, Rifle has been the site of a number of major BER
investigations, including the 2007 Rifle Integrated Field Research
Challenge (IFRC), focused on improving understanding of subsurface flow
and transport relevant to metal and radionuclide contaminants. Many
other scientists from across the nation have performed subsurface
biogeochemical investigations at this “community” field site (the Rifle Community Site).
Those previous studies of Rifle provide foundational understanding to
launch the SFA 2.0, as well as infrastructure needed to carry out
experimental activity. Moreover, since it is located in the semi-arid
Colorado River Basin region, scientific interest in Rifle has broadened,
in that it is a region being threatened by different aspects of global
climate change—including droughts, diminished snowpacks and earlier
snowmelt, and increased wildfires. Located next to the Colorado River,
the floodplain setting of the Rifle site also allows investigations of
terrestrial-aquatic system interactions and their role in biogeochemical
cycles.
The Phase I study of the SFA 2.0 will address several gaps in our
current scientific knowledge. At this time we know very little about
subsurface biogeochemical processes, with this lack of knowledge leading
to uncertainty about carbon and other biogeochemical cycles. There has
also been little work toward quantifying metabolic activity in dynamic
subsurface environments—for example, the manner in which subsurface
microbial communities are organized, or how they evolve, or the nature
of the interactions between these communities and their
physical/chemical environment. Finally, we lack—and need—simulation
approaches that couple microbial competition and activity to
biogeochemical processes and the hydrological cycle up to watershed
scales.
To develop this predictive understanding, the SFA 2.0 is organized
around crosscutting challenges that are tackled by teams focusing on
quantification of: the metabolic potential of the subsurface; organic
matter-mineral dynamics; water, nutrients, and carbon migration in the
subsurface; and watershed biogeochemical functioning—as well as the
development of genome-enabled watershed simulation capability (GEWaSC)
and data management/assimilation approaches. Developed simulation
capabilties will take advantage of DOE high performance computational
facilities, such as NERSC and Chinook. Intense metagenomic analyses will be performed using the DOE Joint Genome Institute
community sequencing program. A series of recent, high-impact SFA
publications have provided significant insights into the subsurface
microbiome at Rifle - these studies suggest the potential of
quantifying how information stored in microbial genomes can be
translated into the biogeochemical functioning of larger systems.
Because it is such a well-investigated site, Rifle offers a perfect
test bed for developing new understanding, approaches, and simulation
capabilities. The SFA 2.0 team is currently searching for a “Second
Site” test bed that they will move to in Phase II—a terrestrial
environment that has additional complexity relative to Rifle, such as
greater changes in elevation, and more or diverse vegetation and soil
structure. In this way, the subsequent phases of SFA 2.0 will learn
from and build on Phase I.
Many LBNL scientists are involved in the new SFA 2.0, including: Susan Hubbard (Science Lead and ESD Division Director), Ken Williams (ESD Environmental Remediation and Water Resources Program Head), Jill Banfield, Harry Beller, Eoin Brodie, Jim Davis, Tetsu Tokunaga, Phil Long, Carl Steefel and Deb Agarwal.. A complete list of the team members and collaborators is provided here.
