Microbial community in limestone pavement: the invisible diversity in the grikes
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My name is Marlon Corrêa Pereira, and I am a soil microbiologist from the Universidade Federal de Viçosa in Brazil. Plant conservation has been my interest since I started working on soil microbiology, in particular hoping to expand our understanding of how microbial communities can support the growth of endangered species from the grasslands and rock outcrops of the Brazilian Atlantic Forest and Savana.
I am currently visiting Carly Stevens and the Limestone Pavement Partnership research group, and I am here to investigate the microbial community in the soils of grikes. We visited the limestone pavements at Dalton Crags (Kendal), Hampsfield Fell (Grange-over-Sands), and Great Asby Scar National Nature Reserve (Great Asby) to sample soil from one pavement in each place. My project aims to understand the connectivity between microbial communities from different places accessing the bacterial and fungal diversity and biomass in 10 samples of soil collected from grikes at different distances along two perpendicular lines.
On a cloudy and windy Monday, a typical day of February in the northwest of England, we went to Dalton Crags, the nearest sampling place. We met Ezra in the park and walked 1 mile to the pavement. The walk was smooth along a little muddy and slippery trail. We had a limited view of the landscape on the day, but I think it would have been bucolic and beautiful on a sunny day.
On Friday of the same week, we went to Hampsfield Fell. Surprisingly, the morning was sunny and windless, and we were around 3 miles from the car park to the pavement. The sunny weather allowed me to take the coat off and to wear a fleece from the middle of the walk and during the sampling - a rarity in England! Great Asby Scar National Nature Reserve was indeed a great place and pleasant weather to finish my field work in the UK limestone pavements, turning the sampling process into a pleasure.
Before starting the samplings, we always did a quick check on the grikes and clints of the limestone to find the best point to start the 22-meter perpendicular sampling lines. Since finishing the first sampling line in Dalton Crags, I realised how hard it would be to obtain a suitable amount of soil from the grikes. Every single sampling was incredibly suspenseful, since we couldn't see the soil in the grikes properly - a lot of guesswork and holding of breath was involved!
Back in the lab, we worked on the extractions of lipids to phospholipids fatty acid analyses, and the DNA to metabarcoding sequencing toward the identification of groups and species of microorganisms. I am glad to be working with helpful researchers, who are always happy to support me. Through our analysis, we are hoping to understand the effect of distance on the distribution of microbes along a pavement and across different areas, to present the composition of microbial community in the pavement, and to find out the microbial groups shared among these spaces.
However, the sampling trips and lab work were beyond sampling soil, getting data, and discussing the results. All the steps were opportunities to learn about places, ecology, limestone, and people. It is fantastic how we get to know more about each other during the process. I love getting the opportunity to talk during the road trips and the walk along the trails, and while digging in grikes (and celebrating the amount of soil we manage to extract)!
I am left in wonder at the friendly relationships built by the research in the places I have been - it's one of the reasons I'm so willing ot leave my office in Brazil and spend some time working in the UK! I'm hoping that this research supports future studies toward plant conservation in the limestones of the UK and abroad, and I am looking towards using these findings to aid the conservation of plants in limestone rock outcrops in Brazil.
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