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Award recognizes CBS prof's pioneering research
BY ANDREW VOWLES
Prof. John Klironomos, Integrative Biology, has received a 2006 E.W.R. Steacie Memorial Fellowship from the Natural Sciences and Engineering Research Council (NSERC) to continue his pioneering studies of how plants and microbes interact and to launch an ambitious international research program that may upend ideas about how we view and treat invasive species.
Studying plant communities — including what goes on beneath the soil surface — may yield ideas for improving food production, sustainable forestry and environmental quality, for mediating climate change and for restoring degraded ecosystems, Klironomos says.
He is one of six Canadian scientists to receive a Steacie fellowship this year, the highest award given by NSERC to outstanding young scientists. He is the second professor to earn a Steacie fellowship while at Guelph.
“This is wonderful recognition for John and for the entire University and a remarkable demonstration of the high quality of our faculty,” says president Alastair Summerlee.
College of Biological Science dean Mike Emes says Klironomos has already made innovative contributions to an area of biological science that has profound implications not only for the discipline of ecology but also for global environmental change.
“John's work on fungi and soil interactions is internationally recognized,” says Emes, “and this award speaks strongly to the quality of his achievements and to the strength of life science research on this campus.”
Klironomos, who already holds a Canada Research Chair in Soil Biology and was an earlier recipient of an Ontario Premier's Research Excellence Award, says he was “grateful and surprised” to learn of the award. It will allow him to focus on his research for the next two years. He hopes to learn more about why so-called invasive plants thrive in their new home — often at the expense of native species — even as they remain in relatively low abundance in their native lands.
He will study about 10 species, including knapweed, a European and Asian arrival whose dense carpets of thistle-like purple flowers are crowding out native species in Western Canada. “Knapweed is a major problem for ranchers and farmers,” says Klironomos. Leafy spurge, another European import, has seeded itself across parts of the southern Prairies and southern Ontario, including Guelph.
Using test plots in North America, Europe and Asia — as well as greenhouse studies in Canada — he will add and remove various fungi to see how these plants perform in their homeland and adopted country.
Unlike his “home and away” studies, other researchers have compared invasive species only in their adopted lands. Many scientists believe organisms thrive in new places because they've escaped their natural predators or competitors back home. But Klironomos isn't so sure.
Much of the “natural enemies” idea is based on visible insect predators, he says. But that view ignores the important role played by organisms that can't be seen. In a Nature paper published in 2002, he showed that interactions between plants and soil microbes account for almost 60 per cent of the relative abundance of plant species.
Klironomos says plants influence their own abundance by changing soil communities. “Good microbes” such as mycorrhizal fungi help plants gain nutrients; other species may accumulate pathogens around their roots that ultimately lead to their own demise. He believes invasive species have “learned” to avoid the bad bugs and cultivate the good ones.
“The organisms that interact with plants below ground are often out of sight, out of mind. New research is increasingly showing that below-ground plant antagonists and mutualists can have strong effects on plant populations and the organization of communities.”
His studies may offer better management options than merely throwing chemicals at the problem in the incomplete view of invasive plants as a pest problem.
“The whole point of biocontrol is that you're looking for some enemy or pest,” says Klironomos, an avid backyard gardener. (Among his research collaborators is his wife and gardening partner, Miranda Hart. A PhD graduate of Guelph, she is currently a post-doc in the Department of Environmental Biology.)
Klironomos, who joined U of G in 1996, has received NSERC discovery and strategic grants and belongs to a collaborative project with Ontario and Quebec researchers on sustainable forest management. He was also invited to submit a special application to NSERC to support his planned studies.
Prof. Moira Ferguson, chair of the Department of Integrative Biology, calls the Steacie fellowship a “major coup for the University. Only the very best get this prize. I feel quite honoured to have someone of John's calibre in our department.”
