About
The Research Grants Program Office (RGPO) oversees a broad grantmaking portfolio of nearly $65 million a year to support research that is critical to California, the nation and the world. RGPO programs enhance UC’s research capacity and excellence, which helps attract top faculty, graduate students, government funding and companies to our state. These grants also enable researchers and community agencies to collaborate and solve the most pressing problems in the state. RGPO also provides grants for training undergraduates, graduate and postdoctoral researchers, whose work will benefit California communities.
Research Grants Program Office (RGPO)
Recent Work (10542)
Diversity, Productivity, and Stability of an Industrial Microbial Ecosystem.
Managing ecosystems to maintain biodiversity may be one approach to ensuring their dynamic stability, productivity, and delivery of vital services. The applicability of this approach to industrial ecosystems that harness the metabolic activities of microbes has been proposed but has never been tested at relevant scales. We used a tag-sequencing approach with bacterial small subunit rRNA (16S) genes and eukaryotic internal transcribed spacer 2 (ITS2) to measuring the taxonomic composition and diversity of bacteria and eukaryotes in an open pond managed for bioenergy production by microalgae over a year. Periods of high eukaryotic diversity were associated with high and more-stable biomass productivity. In addition, bacterial diversity and eukaryotic diversity were inversely correlated over time, possibly due to their opposite responses to temperature. The results indicate that maintaining diverse communities may be essential to engineering stable and productive bioenergy ecosystems using microorganisms.
Simple fisheries and marine reserve models of interacting species: An overview and example with recruitment facilitation
Accounting for species interactions is a key component of ecosystem-based management. Simple models of species interactions provide a framework for making qualitative comparisons and identifying critical dynamics. A review of multispecies-fisheries and marine-reserve models indicates that incorporating species interactions leads to decreased theoretical predictions for sustainable yield and harvest rates and to increased theoretical predictions for the reserve size necessary to protect populations; ontogenetic shifts in interactions also have a significant effect on multispecies model predictions. While previous models have explored negative species interactions (i.e., predation and competition), this paper presents an example marine reserve model with a positive interaction: a spiny lobster-sea urchin-red algae trophic chain where red algae facilitate lobster recruitment. Model results indicate that recruitment facilitation primarily affects the time scale of the species dynamics and the lobster spillover from reserves to harvested areas; the direction of these changes depends on the no-facilitation baseline. Overall, these models indicate the importance of incorporating species interactions into fisheries and reserve management decisions.