Toward understanding the role of biodiversity: From the genomic scale to the ecosystem scale
How is rapidly progressing global environmental change affecting biodiversity?
To address this question, it is necessary to integrate research across a wide range of spatial and temporal scales within ecology.
Our research focuses on how organisms have evolved and diversified through species interactions, such as those between plants and herbivores or pollinators, and between hosts and parasites or pathogens.
Furthermore, we aim to clarify the function of biodiversity, bridging the gap between the genomic and ecosystem scales, by integrating different scales of research. This includes investigating:
•How does the genetic diversity within wild populations influence their sustainability and resilience to environmental change?
•How do the diversity and structure of populations that make up a community affect ecosystem functions, such as the overall productivity of that community?
Currently, we are engaged in the following research projects:
1. Elucidating the latitudinal gradient of forest productivity in East Asia and its underlying mechanisms.
2. Clarifying the interactions between volatile organic compounds released by plants and the microorganisms inhabiting the leaf surface.
3. Investigating how the heterogeneity of snow distribution in alpine zones affects the spatial genetic structure of plant populations.
Educational approach
Diverse and multifaceted approaches to biodiversity research
Our laboratory offers a lecture and practical course titled "Forest Ecosystem Studies" for undergraduate students.
In the lectures, students primarily learn from an ecological perspective about the diversity of organisms in forest ecosystems, ecosystem functions, biogeochemical cycles, relationships with human activities, and the management and conservation of forests.
The practical component utilizes experimental forests and other fields to allow students to experience various types of forests in Japan, with the the goal of acquiring basic knowledge and skills in field survey methods in forest ecology, as well as knowledge and techniques in molecular genetics, chemical analysis, and statistical analysis.
The members of our laboratory study a wide range of organisms, including plants, animals, and microorganisms. Research styles are also highly diverse: some focus on fieldwork, others on laboratory experiments, others on statistical modeling or simulation studies, and some do a bit of everything.
Students who love forests and the organisms that live there are warmly welcome to join us in research.
Vision for industry-academia collaboration
Biodiversity research in the era of big data
Our laboratory’s research primarily involves field science to clarify the impact of biodiversity on ecosystem functions.
Achieving this objective requires techniques for analyzing large-scale population dynamics data, trait data, and genotype data.
Recent advances in remote sensing and genetic analysis technologies have led to an exponential increase in both quality and quantity of data.
However, there is a often a lag between data acquisition and the development of techniques for analyzing this massive amount of data.
We are actively involved in developing such methodologies and making the source code publicly available.
For example, we developed and released software that collectively analyzes and visualizes dynamic parameters—such as recruitment rate, mortality rate, and productivity—of forest communities based on long-term forest monitoring data accumulated by the Ministry of the Environment's Monitoring Site 1000 Project, which covers several hundred species and tens of thousands of individuals (https://github.com/kohyamat/monisenforest-docker).
Furthermore, we established a method for simultaneously genotyping thousands of individuals across multiple species and multiple loci by targeting microsatellite regions in the genome, and also developed software for analyzing the large amounts of data generated by next-generation sequencers (https://github.com/kohyamat/massgenotyping).
Through these efforts, I aim to build multidimensional biodiversity databases based of this massive amount of data, which will contribute to broader societal implementation beyond academic research.
