Florida State University is one of 14 universities from around the globe that have collectively been awarded $12.5 million from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to launch a new Biology Integration Institute (BII), called EMERGE.
Florida State University is one of 14 universities from around the globe that have collectively been awarded $12.5 million from the National Science Foundation (NSF) to launch a new Biology Integration Institute (BII), called EMERGE, which will focus on better understanding ecosystem and climate interactions — like the thawing of the Arctic permafrost — and how they can alter everything from the landscape to greenhouse gases.
EMERGE, which stands for “EMergent Ecosystem Response to ChanGE,” is an ambitious five-year project that will pioneer a new “genes-to-ecosystems-to-genes” (G2E2G) framework for understanding the connections between small-scale microbes and large-scale ecosystem changes, and vice versa. The goal is to discover how the processes that sustain life and enable biological innovation operate and interact within and across different scales of organization, from molecules to cells, species and ecosystems, under dynamically changing conditions. The result will be a framework to enable predictive modeling of ecosystem response to change.
“Predicting how specific environments on the earth will respond to climate change is a critical societal need,” said Jeff Chanton, a professor in the Department of Earth, Ocean and Atmospheric Science and co-principal investigator for EMERGE. “We have assembled a large international, interdisciplinary team to tackle the critical questions that face humankind today. For example, we are investigating the interaction of carbon dioxide exchange with thawing permafrost and the release of the potent greenhouse gas methane, which could result in the acceleration of climate change.”
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Image via Clarice Perryman / University of New Hampshire.
