A Project Proposal by: MOHINISH SHUKLA SR.No. 401095086

CONTENTS Introduction

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Plant Communities: Functional Types

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The Diversity – Stability Debate

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Theoretical Considerations

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The Soil Fungi in the Forest Floor

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References

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FOREST COMMUNITY: STRUCTURE AND FUNCTION

INTRODUCTION " The same spot will support more life if occupied by very diverse forms. We see this in the many generic forms in a square yard of turf, and in the plants or insects on any little uniform islet, belonging almost invariably to as many genera and families as species... We know that it has been experimentally shown that a plot of land will yield a greater weight if sown with several species and genera of grasses, than if sown with only two or three species" Abstract of a letter from C. Darwin, Esq., to Prof. Asa Gray, Boston, USA, dated Down, September 5th, 1857 The idea that greater diversity is correlated with better functioning of the ecosystem is usually taken to begin with MacArthur (1955); though, as the above passage suggests, these ideas were quite obvious to naturalists in the mid-19th century. Another observation that extends atleast to the 1880s is best set forth by Alphonse de Candolle's hypothesis that "the world is set out in a patchwork of different plant formations whose domains depend upon temperature and precipitation". In their search for patterns in the bewildering complexity of nature, the naturalists have noted that certain assemblages of species seem to recur at different times and places. Such assemblages, usually comprising the populations of some or all species coexisting at a site or in a region have been termed "communities". The community thus reflects a grouping of individuals between the extremes of species and ecosystems. This community has been seen as a social unit. The study of communities poses several challenging questions- Why do only so many species occur in a particular community? What are the interactions between members of a community? What are the dynamics of the interactions? The current study is proposed to address some of the questions related to Forest Community Functioning.

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PLANT COMMUNITIES: FUNCTIONAL TYPES The assemblages of individuals in communities are traditionally viewed with respect to the number of species. Yet, from the point of view of the community itself, restricted to its own peculiarities of edaphic and climatic conditions, the species within it must surely be under some constraints, and they would not be expected to be merely a random collection. It seems correct to think of plant species in a community as occupying different niches and contributing to the overall functioning of the community. It would appear, then, that it is more the functionalities of the resident species that would determine how well they fit into the community. From the sixties onwards, much has been said about the uniqueness of species. However, in the recent past, emphasis has been placed on functional grouping of species, which is non-phylogenetic. Steneck and Dethier (1994) trace the functional group approach to MacArthur who, in his 1972 book "Geographical Ecology", predicts that "the future principles of the ecology of coexistence will... be of the form 'for organisms of type A in environment of structure B, such and such a relationship will hold". However, an analogous statement can be traced back to Charles Darwin who, in his "The Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection" says: "When we look at the plants and bushes clothing an entangled bank, we are tempted to attribute their proportional numbers and kinds to what we call chance. But how false a view is this! Every one has heard that when an American forest is cut down, a very different vegetation springs up; but it has been observed that the trees now growing on the ancient Indian mounds, in the Southern United States display the same beautiful diversity and proportion of kinds as the surrounding virgin forests."(Italics mine) Probably the first to classify plants by life form rather than growth form was the Danish botanist, Christen Raunkiaer. The Raunkiaer System of classification that he introduced in 1903 is based on the relation of height above the ground to the perennating tissue. The Raunkiaer system is able to distinguish different ecosystems based on the relative proportions of plants in the six classes it prescribes.

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The idea of functional grouping is to reflect the fact that different plant species would contribute differently to ecosystem functions. These functions could be soil evaporation, transpiration, decomposition, nitrogen fixation, resistance to fire etc. Since it will not be possible to evaluate all such physiological/ physical parameters for all the plants in an ecosystem; easier recorded morphological traits would have to serve as surrogates. (This paragraph and the references therein are adapted from Smith et.al. (1997)). Different workers have tried to classify organisms into functional types based on different criteria. Root (1967) introduced the ecological concept of 'guilds', defining them as 'a group of species that exploit the same class of environmental resources in a similar way', or species 'that overlap significantly in their niche requirements'. The guild concept has been further developed upon by others. The terms character or adaptive syndromes were used by Swaine and Whitmore (1988) and others to describe certain characters that cannot be decoupled because they contribute to a common functional role and sometimes may have a common phylogenetic origin (Stebbins, 1974); and strategy as used by Grime et.al. (1988) to define 'a grouping of similar or analogous genetic characteristics which re-occurs widely amongst species or populations and causes them to exhibit similar ecology'. Paine (1980) used the term 'modules' to define groups of closely interacting species. Friedel et.al. (1988) defined functional types as groups that respond similarly to the same perturbation. Noble (1989) discussed a classification based on a set of physiological, reproductive and life history characters where variation in each character has specific ecologically predictive (rather than descriptive) value. The recognition of functional types, following Gitay and Noble (1997) can be achieved by three means: a) Subjective; based on observations on two or more ecosystems b) Deductive; where a feasible set of functional categories are deduced from an a priori statement of the importance of particular processes in the ecosystem and c) Data-defined approach; wherein the species are assigned into clusters using multivariate techniques on many characters. Gitay and Noble further outline means of analysing the functional classification using the following criteria:

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a) Uniqueness; wherein the same data set leads to a similar grouping using different analytical techniques. b) Congruency; wherein different data sets lead to a similar grouping (implying correlations between traits) c) Convergence; when similar classification are achieved from data collected and analysed for different purposes and d) Repeatability; wherein there is spatial and temporal constancy in the classification scheme. I propose to attempt a similar kind of classification for the plants in the 50-ha plot at Mudumalai, and separately for the 1-ha plots in the Nilgiri Biosphere. I would like to employ different functional classification strategies; if there emerge unique functional groups, we shall have a reasonable functional-type classification in hand. If there does not emerge any clear, single functional group, then the different classification schemes can be utilised by themselves for purposes outlined later, and a comparison between different functional classification schemes can be made. I propose to use the following methods for grouping the plants into functional types: 1) Deductive Approach: Fire plays an important role in Mudumalai (Sukumar, 1997). Therefore, I propose that those traits that would be expected to be important in tolerance to fire will be used to derive functional types. A tentative list of such traits is: •

The ratio of the average thickness of the bark to the average dbh for trees with dbh over 50cms.



Average height of 50% of the leaf biomass. This could also be estimated only for trees over 50cms dbh.



Ability to coppice.



Amount of leaf litter generated. Since some of the trees are deciduous, the season in which this is measured would be important. I propose to measure the leaf litter generated in a season in which it is known that none of the trees are shedding their leaves.

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Effective canopy cover. This would comprise of two parameters: the spread of the canopy as well as how complete or broken is the canopy.



Growth rate.



The medians of the heights and the dbhs of those trees whose height/dbh is greater than half the maximum height/dbh. The reason for choosing this parameter is that, as different species would have different height/dbh class distributions which would change over an (as yet) undetermined time scale, it would be meaningful to include only that subset which is more stable.

2) Data Defined Approach: Several characters of the plants will be used for cluster analysis; and the resulting clusters will be considered as functional types. Here, parameters will be used that need not have a direct role in fire tolerance. A tentative list of the traits that would be used is: •

Average height/dbh of 10% of the tallest trees.



Average surface area to mass ratios of leaves.



Percentage of saplings in open areas. This would be a kind of measure of shade tolerance.



Pollination type.



Phyllotaxy of leaves.



Seed dispersal mechanism.



Canopy cover (area).



Effective canopy cover (%)



Contribution to different vertical forest canopy strata



Niche width

For cluster analysis, quantitative traits are preferred over a mix of qualitative and quantitative traits because of the degree of arbitrariness involved in choosing weights for the quantitative traits that would reflect their relative importance. However, this very arbitrariness can be used advantageously: those weights that give the best correlations (for purposes outlined later) can be thought of as reflecting the relative importance of the quantitative traits chosen.

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THE DIVERSITY-STABILITY DEBATE The stability of functional types has a direct relevance to a long-standing problem in ecology, the relation of biodiversity to ecosystem functioning. Abbreviated as the diversity-stability debate, the problem has to do with various properties of ecosystems like it's stability, productivity, resilience etc. and their relevance to the complexity of the system, usually taken as the number of species. Ecologists in the early part of this century believed that greater species diversity led to better functioning of an ecosystem. Daniel Goodman, in his 1975 review expresses that "the predisposition to expect greater stability of complex systems was probably a combined legacy of eighteenth century theories of political economics, aesthetically pleasing and perhaps religiously motivated attraction to the belief that the wondrous variety of nature must have some purpose in an orderly world, and ageless folkwisdom regarding eggs and baskets" (Goodman, 1975). He further points out flaws in the arguments which ecologists had previously put forward to show that greater diversity leads to greater stability (e.g., Elton, 1958). Though a naturalist would still feel an anthropomorphic affinity for the idea that a diverse/complex system is more stable; there is not much justification in treating this as a maxim. Theoretical as well as empirical evidences point one way or the other; and ne'er have the twain met. Early theoretical work included plausibility arguments of MacArthur (1955), who argued that a complex ecosystem, having a greater number of pathways for the transfer of energy between trophic levels would be more stable as there would always be alternate pathways for energy flow should some of them be destroyed. Mathematical treatment of the problem could be said to begin with the work of Gardner and Ashby (1970), Robert May (1972) and De Angelis (1975) who showed that under certain circumstances, increased connectance can lead to can lead to increased stability. This is a slightly different measure of complexity, as compared to diversity. However, Rejmanek and Stary (1979) and Yodzis (1980), based on empirical data, observed that the connectance (defined as the fraction of interacting pairs to all possible pairs) decreased as the number of species increased. Yodzis (1980) interpreted this to mean that if systems with a larger number of species were to be stable, then the strengths of individual connections would be the decisive factor. However, he pointed out that the decrease in connectance with an increase in the number of species can be expected if the "ecosystems tend to be organised

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into relatively small 'guilds' of species, with most interactions taking place within guilds." This short paper was probably the first to suggest functional classification in relation to the diversity-stability debate. Stuart Pimm, in his 1984 review attempted to define various aspects of complexity and stability. And since, workers have looked at stability from various viewpoints. For example, Silvertown has analysed data from the Park Grass Experiment to show that the community is stable in a strict sense (Connel and Sousa, 1983); that is, it is frequently perturbed, the composition remains within recognisable bounds and that this stability has been observed over a long period (Silvertown, 1987). Frank and McNaughton documented that plant community stability, as measured by the resistance to change in species composition when perturbed by drought, increases with species diversity (Frank and McNaughton, 1991). In a long-term study in Minnesota grasslands, Tilman and Downing showed that stability, measured as resistance of primary productivity and it's recovery from a major drought is greater in more diverse plant communities (Tilman and Downing, 1994). Experiments done at the Ecotron facility at Silwood park, Berkshire, UK by Naeem et.al. showed, under controlled conditions and by manipulation of diversity, that productivity was greater in plots with greater diversity (Naeem et.al., 1994) There have always been criticisms of these studies. Huston has criticised both the grassland as well as the Ecotron experiments (Huston, 1997). McGillivray and Grime showed that differences in response to frost, drought and burning in five adjacent ecosystems in northern England were predictable from the functional traits of the dominant plants, but were independent of plant diversity. Towards the end of 1997 three papers by Tilman et.al. (1997), Hooper et.al. (1997) and Wardle et.al. (1997) have all shown that variation in ecosystem properties is related to differences in functional characteristics; especially resource capture and utilisation, of the dominant plants and there is no evidence that ecosystem processes are dependent on higher levels of biodiversity (Grime, 1997). At the same time, studies on artificially constructed microcosmic ecosystems by McGrady-Steed et.al and Naeem & Li (McGrady-Steed et.al., 1997; Naeem & Li, 1997) showed that variability among replicates and in time decreased across the full range of species richness studied (Hanski, 1997). They also

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demonstrated that the presence of 'redundant' species in these experimental communities leads to more consistent ecosystem function. Finally, in experimental setups, Symstad et.al. showed that a change in ecosystem functioning with declining biodiversity depended on the identity of the species deleted and the composition of the community from which it was deleted. I propose to study the diversity stability relation, mainly in the 50 Ha plot at Mudumalai. In the literature, there are two kinds of ways by which an increase in diversity can be shown to result in an increase in stability. a) The Portfolio Effect. Doak et.al. (1998) and especially Tilman et.al.(1998) discuss the conditions under which an increased stability is merely a statistical consequence of increased diversity. In particular, if the variance of a particular parameter, say abundance, is proportional to the meanz where z>1 for all the species, then an increase in diversity automatically leads to an increase in stability, in this case a decrease in the variance of total abundance. b) As mentioned before, several studies have shown that the identity of individual species is an important factor that determines the properties of an ecosystem. So, it has been argued that ecosystems containing a greater number of species would be more likely to have those that perform better, and would thus appear to be functioning better on average. It is clear from the literature that there are several theoretical reasons why greater diversity would lead to greater stability. However, there are also conditions under which diversity does NOT lead to stability. I intend to firstly address the specific question, is the diversity related to stability at the 50 Ha plot and in the 1 Ha plots at Mudumalai? The measures of diversity would include both indices like Fisher’s/Shannon’s alpha and Pielou’s J’ (actually a measure of evenness) as well as the number of different functional types, as described above. Stability would be measured as: 1) Annual variance in the biomass, which could be estimated as the volume, from the basal areas of stems, or from known relations between biomass and the dbh 2) Mean annual mortality 3) Annual recruitment rates 4) Sapling densities

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The definition of the area that would be considered is important. I propose to address the problem at different spatial scales. For comparing the 1 Ha plots, these would be 10mX10m, 20mX20m and 40mX40m. Within the 50 Ha plot, comparisons upto the 200mX200m are possible. If there do emerge some kinds of relations between the measures of diversity and the measures of stability, I propose to examine the processes that lead to this relationship. Comparisons across the 1 Ha plots cannot be done without accounting for the fact that these are at different locations, and while they are at roughly the same altitude and latitude, they experience very different rainfall patterns and differ in other traits like soil nutrients too. Dattaraja has done a DCA analysis on the various factors that would play a role in determining the species composition of the 1 Ha plots. The first principal axis that emerges is highly correlated with rainfall which, in turn, is well correlated with several properties of the 1 Ha plots (Dattaraja, pers. comm.). I intend to use the rainfall as a covariate while doing all the comparisons between the measures of diversity and the measures of stability. I shall try to test whether the portfolio effect plays a role by looking at how the CV of abundance scales with the mean. To see if the identity of individual species makes a difference, I shall look at associations between individual species and the various stability parameters, for all the species.

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THEORETICAL CONSIDERATIONS  BUILDING A THEORETICAL MODEL

Certain aspects of the diversity-stability debate are relatively consistent. The first is the empirical observation that under similar circumstances, similar-looking communities seem to occur. Secondly, diversity definitely increases during succession, but it doesn't do so forever. This would imply that 1) In an ecosystem, there are both forces that cause an increase in the biodiversity, as well as forces that cause diversity to decline. 2) The balance of such forces will determine how many species can exist. 3) The nature of these forces, as well as the abiotic factors inherent in the system will determine which species can occur. For an ecosystem to function at a certain place, there must be an optimum set of functions, which would be implemented through the resident species. It would seem logical to suppose that the resident species have characteristics which contribute to the functionality of the system in such a way that, at equilibrium, (a) all the functions are optimised, and (b) invading species, with different contributions to functionality, would fare worse than the resident species. The concept of a niche can be defined in terms of contributions to functionality: Species with different contributions to functionality would be thought of as occupying different niches. So, if there are 'n' species and 'm' functions, the net functionality for the jth function would be a function (in the mathematical sense) of ΣSij; where Sij is the contribution of the ith species to the jth function, summed over all i. With each function would be associated an 'optimum value'. It is clear from the model described so far that if there are very few species, then values of the functionalities would be sub-optimum, and more number of species would give a better system functioning. Also, if there are too many species, the values of the functionalities would be beyond the optimum, and fewer species would be better. Since it is expected that no single species will usually contribute equally well to all the function, merely increasing the numbers of a single species will not be enough, as other functions will not be optimised then. .

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I propose to model this scenario using a one-dimensional cellular automaton with periodic boundaries. This is easily represented as a liked list of structures in C/C++. Each node will represent a species and will have various characteristics like existing number of individuals, contributions to the various functions etc. The way I propose to model the diversity reduction /enhancement effects are as follows: Species which contribute to a functionality will, in some sense, be competing for that function. So, if the jth function has exceeded its optimum value, there would be a negative score assigned to all the species that contribute to the function, proportional to how much they contribute. Conversely, if a function has a sub-optimum value, then each of the contributing species gets a positive score, proportional to its contribution. The linear sum of all positive and negative scores would decide the fate of the species in the next iteration in the model. It would be of interest to see if this formulation can lead to an increase/ decrease in stability with an increase/decrease in the number of species. Also, it would be of interest to see if, under the same parameter values, do the species in the model tend to end up with similar numbers and kinds of 'species'.

 COMPARISONS OF COMMUNITY STRUCTURES ACROSS HABITATS The Mudumalai sanctuary harbours several different habitats owing to the sharp rainfall gradient, which falls from about 1900mm in the west to 500mm, 43Kms away in the east. The vegetation accordingly changes from semi-evergreen, moist deciduous forests towards the west through dry deciduous forests in the central, relatively mesic parts to mixed dry deciduous, scrub-like forests towards the eastern, xeric parts. To the casual observer, it would appear that the rainfall gradient causes drastic changes in the forest communities. Intensive investigations also reveal that various forest structural parameters like biomass, species diversity, canopy cover etc. can be explained very well mainly by precipitation, and the other important feature in these forests, fire (Dattaraja, pers. comm.). However, since all these habitats are spatially quite close to each other, one might suspect that there might be certain common features, despite their differences. Doak et.al., in looking at diversity/stability relations from a statistical point of view found that in data derived from the work of David Tilman in Minnesota grasslands, for different habitats the relative abundance, A was related to the rank, R in the following manner:

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A = exp [akb (R-1)], where k is number of species, a & b are constants. This indicates: ¬ Species in themselves, from some point of view, are functional units in an ecosystem ¬ The do exist some broad ecological principles which underlie the distribution of abundances of the constituent species, which are independent of abiotic factors. A preliminary analysis of data generated from the 19 1-Ha plots laid across the rainfall gradient at Mudumalai (Dattaraja et.al., pers. comm.) showed that such a general relationship does hold for the Mudumalai sanctuary. However, there are some discrepancies, especially with respect to the parameter ‘a’. It would be worthwhile to investigate this phenomenon further. Such a broad generalisation, apart from providing a (rare) ecological principle, would also tie in well with the theoretical model described above.  COMMUNITY STRUCTURE AND DYNAMICS

The similarity of species assemblages in similar places has been mentioned before. However, the spatial arrangements of the individuals in these assemblages could either be due to chance, or due to interactions between them. Joshi et.al. have shown, using a computational-geometry-based approach for the 50-ha plot at Mudumalai that certain species had a greater degree of association between themselves or between them and certain other species, than could be expected by chance alone (Joshi et.al., 1997) I wish to extend this study and look at the structure and the dynamics of the associations between the trees over the years. The first question that I propose to address is, over what spatial scales are different species “clumped”? The computational geometry approach is too rigid in it’s seeking for clumping of the species. I intend to look at clumping at all scales from 5m to 500m, and see if different species are clumped at different scales. The second question that I wish to ask is, are the associations between different species fixed or do they change with time? If there are differences in associations between the plant species, then can these be interpreted as resulting from a Markovian process? To test this, transition probabilities can be calculated for all the species and changes over the years can be calculated and compared to an appropriate null model, in which the transition probabilities are calculated assuming that any existing association is due to chance alone.

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THE SOIL FUNGI IN THE FOREST FLOOR One of the important factors that governs forest dynamics is the substratum, the soil, and it is certain that the resident microflora in forest soils play an important role in the observed patterns of the larger plant species. Most of the studies that are done on soil microorganisms deal with observed species diversity. However, people have also looked at soil microorganisms from a more “functional” point of view. For example, Westover et.al. (1997) performed multivariate analysis on various physiological traits of bacteria and fungi isolated from the rhizosphere soil. They showed that rhizosphere microbial populations associated with particular co-occurring perennial plant pairs were significantly different from each other. For the specific case of mycorrhizal fungi, it has been shown that the dominant species tend to change throughout the successional development of forest stands (Mason et.al., 1983). Work by the group of Prof. V. Nanjundiah at the 50 Ha plot in Mudumalai has been done, and they have catalogued some 50 species of fungi. Of these, the common ones are Aspergillus, Penicillium, Fusarium etc., which make up about 60% of all isolates in terms of abundance (Nanjundiah et.al., pers. comm.). I propose to study the 50 Ha plot with reference to the functional properties of the resident soil fungi. Similar to the work of Westover et.al.(1997), I plan to use easily measurable physiological properties of the fungi. These traits would be used to perform cluster analysis. This data will be used to answer the following kinds of questions: a) Over what spatial scale do functional characteristics of soil fungi change in a relatively homogenous plot of forest? b) Do different “functional clusters” show a tendency to be associated with particular tree species in the 50 Ha plot? Methodology: Sampling will be done in two ways. To look at associations with tree species, I shall take 3 replicate samples from the base of atleast 10 trees belonging to the twenty most abundant species (which would make up atleast 95% of all trees in the 50 Ha plot), chosen at random from the entire plot. To look at the spatial scale, I shall firstly do a trial run where I shall sample from a lattice of points, 2m apart, to a maximum of 20m and a total of 10 samples. At each lattice point, three samples 25cm apart will be pooled. All

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samples will be collected from a depth of 30cm. For the final analysis, 5gms of soil from the pooled samples will be taken. After incubating in a suitable buffer, serial dilutions will be plated onto Rose Bengal Agar(RBA), Potato Dextrose agar(PDA) and on CzapekDox Agar(CA), such that there are around 50 colonies per plate. All these colonies will be subcultured, and then all the 150 colonies will be plated onto the following media: 1) Defined medium lacking organic Nitrogen 2) Defined medium lacking organic Carbon 3) Medium with high salt concentration (5% NaCl) 4) Medium in which the sole carbon source is cellulose 5) Medium in which the sole carbon source is arginine 6) Medium in which the sole carbon source is xylan 7) Medium in which the sole carbon source is sorbitol 8) Medium in which the sole carbon source is maltose 9) Medium containing heavy metal at low concentration (e.g. HgCl2) 10) Medium containing 20% polyethyleneglycol 11) Medium at a high pH (pH 9.0) 12) Medium at a low pH (pH 5.0) 13) Complete medium; incubated at 50ºC Presence or absence of growth will only be recorded. These will be used to prepare an adjacency matrix and to compute clusters. Large scale sampling in this manner is possible only if the functional clusters do not vary significantly over the 20m scale chosen. I would also like to try and develop a method for being able to do large-scale screening for functional traits of soil microorganisms. The idea is to basically look at how the various functional traits of the soil microorganisms as a whole change in space or in association with plant species or along any other axis, without bothering about the identity of the constituent organisms. This would enable one to rapidly assess the differences with respect to what the microorganisms DO in the soil, as opposed to simply WHICH microorganisms are present. For this, I intend to adopt the following procedure:

Soil sampling will be as required by the question being asked. After identifying the spots from where samples are to be collected, three soil cores, 25cms apart will be taken, the top 2cm discarded and the three will be pooled in a sterile plastic bag and sealed The soil

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can then be broken up by hand. From this pooled soil, 5gms will be taken in a sterile testtube and washed with about 25ml of 0.1%CaSO4. From this, 5ml will be used for looking at the various physiological parameters and 5ml will be sterilised either by passing it through a 0.2µm filter, or by autoclaving. The media used will be essentially the same as above. Detailed media descriptions are given below (from Westover et.al., 1997): For looking at utilisation of various carbon substrates, the liquid medium contains 1.25gm/l NH4H2PO4, 0.25gm/l KCl, 0.25 gm/l MgSO4, 6.25 gm/l of the substrate and 0.5% triphenyl tertazolium chloride (TTC) as an indicator. The substrates to be tested are cellulose, xylan, arginine, peptone, fructose, sorbitol etc. For testing the effects of salts, heavy metals, antibiotics etc., the basal medium is 8gms/l nutrient broth, 2gm/l yeast extract, 2.6gms/l K2HPO4 dibasic, 0.5 gm/l KH2PO4 monobasic, 0.25 gm/l MgSO4, 5gm/l dextrose and 0.5% TTC. To the basal medium, streptomycin (0.05gm/l), heavy metal (e.g. Zn at 0.07 gm/l), polyethyleneglycol (20%) can be added. All the media will be poured into columns in a microtiter plate. For the twelve different tests chosen, there would be twelve columns and eight rows in a typical 96-well microtiter plate. Thus, four samples (four pairs of test and sterile) can be loaded at a time onto one microtiter plate. After incubating at 24ºC for 24 hours, the change in colour due to reduction of TTC to triphenyl tetrazolium formazan can be estimated using an ELISA plate reader. The degree of colour change can be used to generate distance data between samples with respect to all the twelve characteristics, and cluster analysis can be done using this data.

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A Project Proposal by

It would appear, then, that it is more the functionalities of the resident species that would ... been placed on functional grouping of species, which is non-phylogenetic. ... bank, we are tempted to attribute their proportional numbers and kinds .... ecosystems in northern England were predictable from the functional traits of the.

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