Pollard Katherine

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Last Name
Pollard
First Name
Katherine
ORCID
0000-0002-9870-6196

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  • Article
    Existing climate change will lead to pronounced shifts in the diversity of soil prokaryotes
    (American Society for Microbiology, 2018-10-23) Ladau, Joshua ; Shi, Yu ; Jing, Xin ; He, Jin-Sheng ; Chen, Litong ; Lin, Xiangui ; Fierer, Noah ; Gilbert, Jack A. ; Pollard, Katherine ; Chu, Haiyan
    Soil bacteria are key to ecosystem function and maintenance of soil fertility. Leveraging associations of current geographic distributions of bacteria with historic climate, we predict that soil bacterial diversity will increase across the majority (∼75%) of the Tibetan Plateau and northern North America if bacterial communities equilibrate with existing climatic conditions. This prediction is possible because the current distributions of soil bacteria have stronger correlations with climate from ∼50 years ago than with current climate. This lag is likely associated with the time it takes for soil properties to adjust to changes in climate. The predicted changes are location specific and differ across bacterial taxa, including some bacteria that are predicted to have reductions in their distributions. These findings illuminate the widespread potential of climate change to influence belowground diversity and the importance of considering bacterial communities when assessing climate impacts on terrestrial ecosystems.
  • Article
    Toward a predictive understanding of Earth’s microbiomes to address 21st century challenges
    (American Society for Microbiology, 2016-05-13) Blaser, Martin J. ; Cardon, Zoe G. ; Cho, Mildred K. ; Dangl, Jeffery ; Donohue, Timothy J. ; Green, Jessica L. ; Knight, Rob ; Maxon, Mary E. ; Northen, Trent R. ; Pollard, Katherine ; Brodie, Eoin L.
    Microorganisms have shaped our planet and its inhabitants for over 3.5 billion years. Humankind has had a profound influence on the biosphere, manifested as global climate and land use changes, and extensive urbanization in response to a growing population. The challenges we face to supply food, energy, and clean water while maintaining and improving the health of our population and ecosystems are significant. Given the extensive influence of microorganisms across our biosphere, we propose that a coordinated, cross-disciplinary effort is required to understand, predict, and harness microbiome function. From the parallelization of gene function testing to precision manipulation of genes, communities, and model ecosystems and development of novel analytical and simulation approaches, we outline strategies to move microbiome research into an era of causality. These efforts will improve prediction of ecosystem response and enable the development of new, responsible, microbiome-based solutions to significant challenges of our time.