Soil Microbiomes Under Climate Change and Implications for Carbon Cycling

Abstract

Communities of soil microorganisms (soil microbiomes) play a major role in biogeochemical cycles and support of plant growth. Here we focus primarily on the roles that the soil microbiome plays in cycling soil organic carbon and the impact of climate change on the soil carbon cycle. We first discuss current challenges in understanding the roles carried out by highly diverse and heterogeneous soil microbiomes and review existing knowledge gaps in understanding how climate change will impact soil carbon cycling by the soil microbiome. Because soil microbiome stability is a key metric to understand as the climate changes, we discuss different aspects of stability, including resistance, resilience, and functional redundancy. We then review recent research pertaining to the impact of major climate perturbations on the soil microbiome and the functions that they carry out. Finally, we review new experimental methodologies and modeling approaches under development that should facilitate our understanding of the complex nature of the soil microbiome to better predict its future responses to climate change. Expected final online publication date for the Annual Review of Environment and Resources, Volume 45 is October 19, 2020. Please see http://www.annualreviews.org/page/journal/pubdates for revised estimates.

Lake Ecosystem Robustness and Resilience Inferred from a Climate-Stressed Protistan Plankton Network

“…Although co-occurrence network analyses are limited to deriving potential species association patterns exclusively from significant correlations in species (or ASV, OTU) abundance matrices rather than from experimental observations, numerous studies have shown that such associations can be correctly predicted. More importantly, they allow for drawing valuable conclusions on community- or ecosystem-level [ 12 , 14 , 17 , 18 , 19 , 22 , 23 , 24 , 43 ]. The success and reliability of such studies, however, strongly depend on the quality of the network analysis design.…”

“…Such associations and their persistence under environmental changes, however, are a powerful indicator to assess the resilience and robustness of an ecosystem affected by these changes [ 12 ]. Thereby, ecosystem robustness describes the resistance of a community to maintain its functioning during a disturbance by stressors (that is, its buffering capacity during e.g., periods of warming), while resilience describes the reorganization of a community back to a stable state after disturbance by stressors [ 13 , 14 , 15 ].…”

Disentangling soil microbiome functions by perturbation

“…Other types of perturbations like drought, flooding, alteration of CO 2 levels, and xenobiotics will not be discussed here. Many of these perturbations are being studied in the context of climate change and have been recently reviewed in other publications (Jansson and Hofmockel, 2020 ; Naylor et al ., 2020b ; Veach et al ., 2020 ; de Vries et al ., 2020 ).…”

Ecological stoichiometry as a foundation for omics-enabled biogeochemical models of soil organic matter decomposition

“…SOM decomposition is regulated by physical, chemical, hydrologic, and biological controls (collectively called biophysical controls) on resource availability that determine microbial energy generation and C and nutrient acquisition (Robertson et al 2019; Wang and Houlton 2009;Zhang et al 2014). These processes are notoriously difficult to measure and predict beyond the scale of experimental plots (Bond-Lamberty et al 2016;Naylor et al 2020). Because of this, SOM decomposition at scales most relevant to climate change continues to be predicted mainly through generalized environmental proxies such as moisture, temperature, minerology, and total soil C or nutrient pool sizes (Bailey et al 2018)-parameters that leave a substantial amount of uncertainty surrounding model predictions (Todd-Brown et al 2013.…”