Back to Existing Special Sessions >>
Beyond the Black Box: Integrating Advanced Microbial Characterization Data with Subsurface Reactive Transport Models
Conveners: Timothy D. Scheibe, Pacific Northwest National Laboratory and Eoin L. Brodie, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory
Microbial processes are commonly represented in subsurface reactive transport models using relatively simple reaction-rate models that do not account for complexities of microbial function and community dynamics. While this approach has been effective in many settings, we believe there is now an opportunity to significantly improve the foundational basis of reactive transport model predictions by integrating newly available microbial characterization data and understanding. The field of environmental microbiology has recently taken a quantum leap due to developments in molecular biology, enabling holistic views of complex microbial communities. Recent technological advances such as high-throughput multiplex sequencing, high-density microarrays, and environmental proteomics now provide a deluge of information on the nature and function of microbial communities. This session will explore novel approaches to incorporating this information into predictive simulations of biogeochemical processes having relevance to scientific and engineering problems. Such approaches include direct linkage of genomics-based models of cell function (in silico models) and reactive transport codes, and modeling of environmental-microbial interactions using approaches such as logical networks, boosting, and random forests.
