Distinct patterns of soil bacterial and fungal community assemblages in subtropical forest ecosystems under warming

Abstract

Climate change globally affects soil microbial community assembly across ecosystems. However, little is known about the impact of warming on the structure of soil microbial communities or underlying mechanisms that shape microbial community composition in subtropical forest ecosystems. To address this gap, we utilized natural variation in temperature via an altitudinal gradient to simulate ecosystem warming. After 6 years, microbial co‐occurrence network complexity increased with warming, and changes in their taxonomic composition were asynchronous, likely due to contrasting community assembly processes. We found that while stochastic processes were drivers of bacterial community composition, warming led to a shift from stochastic to deterministic drivers in dry season. Structural equation modelling highlighted that soil temperature and water content positively influenced soil microbial communities during dry season and negatively during wet season. These results facilitate our understanding of the response of soil microbial communities to climate warming and may improve predictions of ecosystem function of soil microbes in subtropical forests.

Long‐term warming increased carbon sequestration capacity in a humid subtropical forest

“…2017). In addition, we found that the C‐related enzyme activity did not respond to long‐term warming (Figure 4), and the soil microbial community tends towards fungal dominance (Figure 4) that may have higher C assimilation efficiency (Soares & Rousk, 2019) and become more stable at our site (Zhou et al., 2023) relative to the responses under short‐term warming. These results suggest that soil microorganisms have thermal acclimation to long‐term warming, thus reducing the soil C loss caused by soil respiration.…”

“…In this study, there was no response of soil heterotrophic respiration to long-term warming (Figure S6), and the temperature sensitivity of soil respiration decreased with warming duration (Figure 3; forests and cultivation experiments (Bradford et al, 2010;Melillo et al, 2017;Romero-Olivares et al 2017). In addition, we found that the C-related enzyme activity did not respond to long-term warming (Figure 4), and the soil microbial community tends towards fungal dominance (Figure 4) that may have higher C assimilation efficiency (Soares & Rousk, 2019) and become more stable at our site (Zhou et al, 2023) relative to the responses under short-term warming.…”

“…The dominant forest type at 600 m above sea level in the area is mountain evergreen broadleaf forest (MEBF), and the dominant plant species of MEBF include Ardisia lindleyana , Itea chinensis , Machilus breviflora , Myrsine seguinii , Schima superba , and Syzygium rehderianum . The soils are classified as Ultisols, developed from sandstone and shale bedrocks at approximately 70–80 cm deep (Fang et al., 2020; Lie et al., 2021; Zhou et al., 2023).…”

Soil microbial subcommunity assembly mechanisms are highly variable and intimately linked to their ecological and functional traits

“…Particularly, the assembly of soil prokaryotic communities were less affected by dispersal limitation (Figure 2a,b). The dissimilarities in assembly mechanisms between soil fungal and prokaryotic communities have been documented in several studies (Jiao et al, 2022;Zhou et al, 2023), which can be explained by their intrinsic differences. First, the dispersal of microbes usually occurs by passive mechanisms and strongly depends on the dispersal probability of each microbial taxon (Golan et al, 2017;Nemergut et al, 2013;Zhou & Ning, 2017).…”

Editorial: The impact of climate change on nutrient composition of staple foods and the role of diversification in increasing food system resilience

“…The soil ability for C and N sequestration, or the transformation of P in plant rhizosphere, are highly dependent on the biodiversity of the microbial communities ( Xu et al., 2022 ). Recent studies showed that elevated CO 2 ( Wang et al., 2023 ), changing precipitation patterns ( Zuo et al., 2022 ), or fluctuations in temperature ( Zhou et al., 2022 ), differently affect soil microbial communities. Therefore, soil microbiome, functionality and fertility should be considered as a complex network, and all players should be considered when looking at future scenarios.…”