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Did you know health is not just about not being sick? It is about feeling well. In healthy ecosystems, you can find plants, animals, water, rocks, and soil, all interacting with many microbes. Thanks to this biodiversity we have clean air, fresh water, and nutritious food. Bees and other animals pollinate flowers to help grow fruits and vegetables. Birds spread seeds that grow into trees and forests. Plants clean the air we breathe. And people feel better in nature. Healthy ecosystems, therefore, keep people healthy. While public health programs teach people about healthy food and give them access to medicines, people make ecosystems healthier by protecting nature. You can help too, by taking care of your health and your surrounding ecosystem, learning about the world, and supporting decisions and actions that protect nature and people. By becoming guardians of Earth’s biodiversity, we can all have a healthy future together.
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Underground Heroes: Plants and Microbes Partner to Shape Our World
Did you know that microbes and plants can help each other survive? Microbes—like bacteria and fungi, for example—can help plants find food and water and can even make them healthier during stressful times. In return, plants give microbes food and a place to live. The world as we know it would not exist without plants, microbes, and their partnerships. Unfortunately, changes to climate will also change our environments. Therefore, studying how plants and microbes partner will help us predict environmental changes to our planet and its inhabitants. In this article, we discuss how microbes and plants partner to support life on Earth.
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- Award ID(s):
- 2109481
- PAR ID:
- 10513457
- Publisher / Repository:
- Frontiers
- Date Published:
- Journal Name:
- Frontiers for Young Minds
- Volume:
- 11
- ISSN:
- 2296-6846
- Format(s):
- Medium: X
- Sponsoring Org:
- National Science Foundation
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Abstract I asked whether Grime's triangle of competitive, stress tolerance and ruderal ecological strategies—which was originally developed for plants—applies to microbes.I conducted a synthesis of empirical studies that tested relationships among microbial traits presumed to define the competitive, stress tolerance and ruderal, and other ecological strategies.There was broad support for Grime's triangle. However, the ecological strategies were inconsistently linked to shifts in microbial communities under environmental changes like nitrogen and phosphorus addition, warming, drought, etc. We may be missing important ecological strategies that more closely influence microbial community composition under shifting environmental conditions.We may need to start by documenting changes in microbial communities in response to environmental conditions at fine spatiotemporal scales relevant for microbes. We can then develop empirically based ecological strategies, rather than modifying those based on plant ecology.Synthesis. Microbes appear to sort into similar ecological strategies as plants. However, these microbial ecological strategies do not consistently predict how community composition will shift under environmental change. By starting ‘from the ground up’, we may be able to delineate ecological strategies more relevant for microbes.more » « less
- Free Publicly Accessible Full Text
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Accepted Manuscript
- Journal Article:
- https://doi.org/10.3389/frym.2023.874363
