Microbial activity in alpine soils under climate change

Distribution of Soil Extracellular Enzymatic, Microbial, and Biological Functions in the C and N-Cycle Pathways Along a Forest Altitudinal Gradient

“…Climatic conditions (i.e., decreased temperature and humidity) are heavily influenced by altitude, which in turn affects vegetation distribution/composition and alters the quality and quantity of litter/soil characteristics and C loss (Kotas et al, 2018;Quan et al, 2019). Recent studies have documented how changes in climatic conditions and forest canopy composition associated with altitude can affect the litter decomposition rate (Cardelli et al, 2019), soil microbial/enzyme activities (Feng et al, 2019;D'Alò et al, 2021), and nutrient storage in different ways (Bello et al, 2015).…”

“…Despite the importance of soil nutrient cycling in the characterization of soil biogeochemistry under varying forest ecosystems (Bello et al, 2015;Frouz, 2018), the nature of soil nutrient reservoirs and their turnover in different regions are largely unknown. SOM decomposition involves both chemical and biological processes, including enzymatic catalysis (Sierra and Causeret, 2018;Nottingham et al, 2019), which generally decrease with increasing altitude, resulting in slower decomposition of organic matter (OM) (D'Alò et al, 2021).…”

“…Soil extracellular enzyme activities are essential for C and N cycling/stocking and litter decomposition and thus for microbial life (Baldrian and Štursová, 2011;Šnajdr et al, 2013;D'Alò et al, 2021). They also play an essential role in soil fertility as useful indicators for soil management (Baldrian et al, 2010;Cardelli et al, 2019).…”

“…Soil nutrients (Cardelli et al, 2019), forest stands (Šnajdr et al, 2013), and climate (Walker et al, 2018) are factors affecting extracellular enzyme activity along altitudinal gradients. Recent studies have shown that the activity of C-and N-dependent enzymes has different trends with increasing altitude (Ndossi et al, 2020;D'Alò et al, 2021). The effects of altitude on soil extracellular enzyme activities are highly variable across individual studies (Lladó et al, 2017), since they do not follow simple biochemical rules (Baldrian et al, 2013).…”

“…The effects of altitude on soil extracellular enzyme activities are highly variable across individual studies (Lladó et al, 2017), since they do not follow simple biochemical rules (Baldrian et al, 2013). It is widely assumed that extracellular enzyme activity increases with increase in temperature, but in the forest altitudinal gradient their activity is more related to the quality of available OM, vegetation, and nutrient demands of the microbial biomass (Nottingham et al, 2019;D'Alò et al, 2021), which can have different trends with altitude (Lladó et al, 2017;Ndossi et al, 2020). Meng et al (2020) reported that the higher C content of the soils at the higher altitude may denote a bigger labile C availability for C-dependent extracellular enzymes.…”