Dalinda Bouraoui

Soils are complex and diverse habitats. They provide various essential functions such as crop production, nutrient cycling or water filtration. Although soil organisms play integral roles in most soil functions, they are often overlooked in soil quality monitoring programs. In order to understand and protect soil microbial communities and their functions in agricultural systems, it is important to assess their resilience to management-related factors such as compaction, plant protection and fertilization.

The aim of my PhD project is to map microbial biodiversity across Switzerland by investigating the occurrence and distribution of taxa, their correlations to environmental factors and their responses to different stress factors. My project is divided into two parts. In the first part, I will assess fungal biodiversity in Swiss soils by taking advantage of the Biodiversity Monitoring Switzerland data collection (BDM, biodiversitymonitoring.ch) where soil samples have been obtained during a field campaign in 2014 and 2015. This sampling included 255 sites distributed across the six main biogeographical regions of Switzerland and different land-use types, ranging from natural to various anthropogenic environments. In the second part of my project, I will use an experimental approach to design stress tests either at field sites, in the greenhouse, or in climate chambers at the Agroscope research station. Microbial communities will be studied using molecular tools, such as metabarcoding of ribosomal marker genes. The workflow will include design of pot trials, soil collection, DNA extraction, PCR amplification, DNA sequencing, and to a large extent bioinformatics and statistical analyses.

As an external PhD student at ETH, I am a member of the Molecular Ecology group at Agroscope Reckenholz, center for agricultural research of the Swiss Confederation which is affiliated with the Federal Office for Agriculture (FOAG). My ETH supervisors are Prof. Johan Six and Dr. Martin Hartmann and my Agroscope supervisors are Dr. Franco Widmer and Dr. Johanna Mayerhofer.

Education

2014 – 2017 Master of science in Biogeosciences specialization in Geomicrobiology
2011 – 2014 Bachelor of science pluridisciplinary in Biology and Ethnology, University of Neuchatel

Publications

Bouraoui, D., Cekstere, G., Osvalde, A., Vollenweider, P., & Rasmann, S. (2019). Deicing salt pollution affects the foliar traits and arthropods' biodiversity of lime trees in Riga's street greeneries. Frontiers in Ecology and Evolution, 7, 282.
Front. Ecol. Evol., 31 July 2019 | external pagehttps://doi.org/10.3389/fevo.2019.00282