Climate change and crops: How high-performance modeling of bacterial-fungi communities can improve food security and biofuel production in an ever-changing climate.

Climate change threatens the makeup of our environment and will place pressure on current agricultural practices throughout the USA and beyond. This necessitates the development and implementation of techniques to optimize crop growth in current agricultural setups and to further enable crop growth in previously inhospitable regions. One promising technique is the introduction of microbial communities into crop farmland whose synergistic interactions have been shown to promote an improved plant biomass yield and resilience to environment perturbations. However, the complex interactions that occur are challenging to understand and performing bio-secure experiments in-situ is unfeasible. Therefore, advanced computational models are required to study these bacteria-fungi-crop community interactions. We develop hybrid continuum-discrete models for physics and biology informed modelling of the complex interactions between microbes and their shared environment. Our multiscale models utilize high performance GPU-accelerated techniques to model the large-scale systems in realistic detail. This software can be used to understand bacteria-fungi interactions and can suggest potential bioengineering interventions to help guide farming practices in an ever-changing climate.