Big sagebrush is among the most widely translocated plant species of restoration concern in the Intermountain West due to impacts from wildfire, invasive species and climate change. In sagebrush ecosystems, natural resource managers rely on seed and seedling translocations — human-mediated movement of organisms to a new area — to restore degraded areas, foster post-disturbance recovery and promote future climate adaptation. These restoration efforts increasingly consider climate-informed seed sourcing (e.g., sourcing seeds from regions currently experiencing the projected future climate of a restoration site) to enhance revegetation projects. However, species interactions, particularly between plants and their soil microbial communities, can also influence how new plants grow and take root. For example, some soil microorganisms can help dryland plants acquire water and other resources, which may improve their capacity to overcome stressful conditions. In other scenarios, soil microbes might act as pathogens that limit plant establishment. The effect of soil microbes on restoration outcomes depends on the plant population, the local soil microbial community and the environmental context in which the interaction occurs.

Climate change is expected to bring prolonged periods of drought and heat to sagebrush steppe ecosystems, disrupting the environmental context that these interacting species are used to. These novel environmental conditions might disrupt the co-evolved interactions at sites, resulting in more harmful effects of climate change on plant persistence. Further, climate-informed seed translocations might be unsuccessful if seed populations are exposed to novel pathogens or if populations lose the soil microbes that they rely on for growth and survival. Thus, these invisible organisms may have a significant impact on our ability to restore habitat and promote climate adaptation. Despite the potential importance of these interactions, we currently lack the ability to integrate microbial impacts into restoration planning at a scale relevant to land management due to the inaccessible equipment needed to measure soil microbes and the uncertainty in how plant-soil microbe interactions will respond to climate change scenarios.

As a NW CASC fellow, Naomi will partner with Idaho Fish and Game’s (IDFG) habitat restoration program to measure the effects of climate change and microbial interactions on plant establishment outcomes and explore ways to integrate soil microbes into restoration planning across southwest Idaho. Through experimental manipulations of climate and soil microbial interactions, she will measure the effects of novel microbes and climate change on big sagebrush populations currently used in IDFG restoration projects, helping to plan for seed translocation projects. Further, she will explore the feasibility of predicting microbial communities based on easily measured environmental variables like climate and soil to predict restoration outcomes at larger spatial scales necessary for broad implementation of soil microbial ecology into plant restoration planning.