D-Dert Experiment GeoChip Analysis Results

Patterns of biodiversity, such as the increase toward the tropics and the peaked curve during ecological succession, are fundamental phenomena for ecology. Such patterns have multiple, interacting causes, but temperature emerges as a dominant factor across organisms from microbes to trees and mammals, and across terrestrial, marine, and freshwater environments. However, there is little consensus on the underlying mechanisms, even as global temperatures increase and the need to predict their effects becomes more pressing. The purpose of this project is to generate and test theory for how temperature impacts biodiversity through its effect on biochemical processes and metabolic rate. A combination of standardized surveys in the field and controlled experiments in the field and laboratory measure diversity of three taxa -- trees, invertebrates, and microbes -- and key biogeochemical processes of decomposition in seven forests distributed along a geographic gradient of increasing temperature from cold temperate to warm tropical. D-Dert is a lab incubation experiment to test the effect of temperature on biodiversity. The original dataset was created by Michael Kaspari's lab at the University of Oklahoma in 2012 -- using soil sampled from a single site in Oklahoma and processed by the University of Oklahoma Institute for Environmental Genomics with an GeoChip 4.6 IEG Microarray data analysis pipeline as part of a macrosystems biodiversity and latitude project supported by the National Science Foundation under Cooperative Agreement DEB#1065836.