soggy environment prevents plant material from fully decomposing, meaning carbon remains in the plant matter and is not returned to the atmosphere. These marshy, wetland areas make up only about three percent of the earth’s land mass but store twice as much carbon as all the trees on the planet, aptly earning them the moniker ‘carbon sink’. Peat is often harvested and used for agriculture and gardening to improve the growth and productiv- ity of plants. One of the most critical environmental impacts of harvesting peat moss is the release of underground carbon stores into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide and methane. Five percent of our annual greenhouse gas emissions are estimated to come from the millions of acres of harvested peat- land. In addition to human activities decimating peat bogs, the warming climate also dries up the bogs and impacts the very plant life that produces peat. The HGSC, along with collaborators from the JGI and Oak Ridge National Laboratory, is investigating samples from a large study called the Spruce and Peatland Responses Under Changing Environments (SPRUCE) project. It aims to predict or simulate the fate of peat-stored carbon in response to environ- mental disruption. This whole-ecosystem experiment is located in the Marcell Experimental Forest in northern Minnesota. Ongoing studies are looking at microbial communities, moss populations, various higher plant types, and some insect groups within the peatland ecosystem. The research team is especially interested in investigating a fundamental member of the ecosys- tem, Sphagnum mosses. There are over 160 different sphagnum moss species. They can hold up to 20 times their dry weight in water, making them the perfect ground cover to keep peat bogs soggy and delay plant decomposition. By artificially warm- ing the mosses and peat bogs at SPRUCE sites, researchers determined that mosses lose photo- synthetic productivity and die quicker in hot tem- peratures 3 . Without the mosses insulating the bogs, carbon can leach from the soil into the atmosphere.
PROTECTING THE WORLD’S LARGEST CARBON SINKS USING GENOMICS The HGSC also studies plants in an environmentally valuable ecosystem called peatlands (also called peat bogs) which form over tens of thousands of years in areas that cannot properly drain excess water. The
Research Associate Lori Boston works on sequencing preparation for sphaghum mosses that are studied in the HGSC lab.
SPAGNUM MOSS
HUDSONALPHA INSTITUTE FOR BIOTECHNOLOGY
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