The Firs environmental research station

Environmental change is leading to crop losses across the world. Recent work in Manchester has identified a strategy to develop plants with increased tolerance of environmental stress, by breeding a “safety valve” into photosynthesis, which protects against stress-induced production of harmful free-radicals.

We are trialling this approach in wheat, oil seed and soya.

Smart agriculture seeks to use sensing technologies to monitor crop growth. At the Firs a team led by Professor Bruce Grieve has been developing systems to follow in real time the growth of crops both above and below ground. This can be applied to phenomics approaches to speed the breeding of climate-smart crops.

The microalgal growth facility in the Firs Greenhouse allows the pilot-scale cultivation of microalgae in small raceway-style ponds of up to 600 L. Microalgae are of interest to researchers and to industry for their potential uses for a wide variety of applications, including as sustainable sources of biochemical. These applications include use of microalgal biomass for nutrition and health, pharmaceuticals, cosmetics, bioenergy, biomaterials, animal feed, biofertilisers, and for pollutant removal or nutrient recovery from waste-streams. These ponds allow us to test conditions at a larger scale and to demonstrate that characteristics that we see in the laboratory at small scale (such as 200 mL) can be replicated at a much larger scale. We are also using the ponds to perform computational modelling and prediction of mass cultivation conditions to allow the improvement of biomass production.

Recent microalgal work in the facility has been funded through the EnhanceMicroAlgae project. Contact Konstantinos Theodoropoulos from the Department of Chemical Engineering and Jon Pittman from Department of Earth and Environmental Science for any questions about our work.

Droughts are becoming more frequent and more intense, and pose a major threat to the functioning of terrestrial ecosystems. Essential ecosystem services, including carbon storage, and the release of nutrients for plant growth, depend on the activity of microorganisms in the soil. Such activities are often limited by water availability; hence drought can severely perturb ecosystem functions through its impacts on soil microbes. The SoilResist project will investigate what factors may contribute to the capability of soil microbes to a) resist drought impacts and b) to recover from them, such that ecosystem functions are restored.

Our mesocosm experiment at the Firs Botanical Grounds explores the roles of ongoing nitrogen pollution, grassland plant community composition, and their potential interactions, on the soil microbiome’s resistance to, and recovery from, drought. We use a full-factorial experimental design to identify potential drought thresholds – i.e. how severe a drought must be before ecosystem functioning is irreparably impacted - and how management may influence where this threshold lies.

We hypothesise that nitrogen pollution will erode the capacity of microbes to resist drought, but a more species-rich and functionally-diverse plant community will enhance microbial resistance.