Predicting Microbial CO2 Production from Soils on a Global Scale

The objective of this project is to remove uncertainties in global climate model carbon fluxes from soils by crossing disciplinary boundaries between microbiome and earth science to use AI for predicting soil carbon fluxes from sequencing data.

“Microbes and their metabolism run the world’s biogeochemical cycles. As such, they are key players in the global climate — driving massive fluxes of all three major greenhouse gases. Remarkably, climate models do not explicitly incorporate knowledge of microbial metabolism in CO2 fluxes, as a result there is huge uncertainty in how much CO2 is produced and consumed by microbes. We aim to use laboratory measurements and machine learning to close this gap in knowledge and improve climate modeling.”

Seppe Kuehn, Ecology and Evolution