Arctic carbon under threat from climate extremes: Impacts of extreme climatic events on soil carbon and microbial communities

While recent research on Arctic browning has focused on the very visible damage impacts seen above ground on plants, almost nothing is known of the impacts below ground on soil carbon and soil microbes. This is a major omission given arctic soils contain vast stores of carbon, and initial work suggests the release of this could be greatly affected by extreme climatic events, with consequences for feedback to climate. This PhD will study the impacts of extreme climatic events on soil carbon cycling and fluxes in arctic ecosystems, with methods including measurements of soil carbon, assessment of CO2 fluxes using infra-red gas analysis, and C tracing techniques. It will also use state-of-the-art molecular ecology approaches (e.g. Illumina MiSeq, Nanopore, and associated bioinformatics) to determine changes in the biodiversity and functioning of the soil microbes that cycle carbon.