The Rolando Lab studies how interacting microorganisms, plants, and soils respond to and become involved in feedback loops with environmental changes. The main objectives on this subject are:

1. To link microbial and plant function and activity to carbon fluxes in the face of climate change.

2. To decipher the role of microbial communities in ecosystem adaptation and resilience to environmental changes.

3. To gain a predictive understanding on how microbial activity and function respond to ecosystem state changes caused by anthropogenic stressors.

In all our work, the Rolando Lab, in collaboration with research partners, aims to upscale microbial activity to ecosystem- and landscape-level processes. To achieve this, we will foster collaborations to combine the measurement of biogeochemical process rates using stable isotope tracers, the study of in situ microbial ecophysiology using multi-omics methods, the measurement of key nutrient fluxes at the ecosystem level, and the upscaling of these processes to the landscape level through a blend of statistical and geospatial analyses.