Collaborative Research: BoCP-Design: Climate change alteration of soils functional biodiversity of the Páramos, Colombia

The unique geographic situation of the cold and humid Páramos being already on the edge of their geo-climatic range provides us with an unparalleled opportunity to study a soil microbial community from carbon-rich soils that are extremely vulnerable to both the raise in temperature and decrease of moisture that will impact soils around the globe as climate change progresses. Our project aims at starting to address the need to disentangle the effect of moisture and temperature on the activity and composition of the microbial communities controlling the fate of organic carbon in soils (Objective 1), while assembling an international team of experts capable of scaling up the understanding of these processes at the landscape and regional level by integrating the functioning of the belowground microbial community with the above-ground vegetation (Objective 2).