Testing plant VOCs as indicators of grassland composition and drought stress
There is an urgent requirement for scalable approaches to monitoring ecosystem condition. A novel, non-invasive method is to use volatile organic compounds (VOCs), which are continually emitted into the atmosphere by plants. VOC emissions create dynamic chemical “scentscapes” that can contain information about both community composition and physiological stress. Recent studies have shown that plant species, diversity and drought can all influence VOC emissions, but it remains unclear whether these ecological signals remain recoverable after community mixing. This project will test whether VOC profiles can distinguish community-composition and droughtassociated signals across controlled and semi-natural grassland systems, laying the foundations for future non-invasive ecosystem monitoring approaches.
Aims and Objectives
The overall aim of this project is to investigate whether grassland plant community composition and drought stress leave detectable, separable and recoverable signatures within VOC profiles across both controlled greenhouse and semi-natural field systems. The project has five core objectives:
- Objective 1 – Determine whether three focal grassland species produce distinguishable VOC profiles in monoculture under controlled conditions.
- Objective 2 – Determine whether species-associated VOC signatures remain detectable, separable, and recoverable in mixed three-species communities.
- Objective 3 – Determine whether the three focal grassland species produce distinguishable VOC profiles under drought stress in monoculture.
- Objective 4 – Determine whether drought-associated VOC signatures remain detectable, separable, and recoverable in mixed three-species communities.
- Objective 5 – Explore whether drought-associated VOC structure is detectable in semi-natural “RainDrop” field grassland plots.
Exploratory analysis will assess whether there are consistent VOC markers of drought or species identity, contributing to open-access VOC reference libraries to inform future landscape-scale monitoring.
Approach
The project will have two stages: (i) a controlled greenhouse experiment, involving three grassland plant species in both monocultures and mixed communities, and (ii) a seminatural field validation stage at the RainDrop long-term drought experiment (Wytham Woods). The controlled experiment will provide reference data with which to interpret the field experiment.
Project details
Dates: MBiol project. Oct 2026 - Jun 2027
Research Team: