Abstract
How diversity influences the stability of a community function is a major question in ecology. However, only limited empirical investigations of the diversity–stability relationship in soil microbial communities have been undertaken, despite the fundamental role of microbial communities in driving carbon and nutrient cycling in terrestrial ecosystems. In this study, we conducted a microcosm experiment to investigate the relationship between microbial diversity and stability of soil decomposition activities against changes in decomposition substrate quality by manipulating microbial community using selective biocides. We found that soil respiration rates and degradation enzyme activities by a coexisting fungal and bacterial community (a taxonomically diverse community) are more stable against changes in substrate quality (plant leaf materials) than those of a fungi-dominated or a bacteria-dominated community (less diverse community). Flexible changes in the microbial community composition and/or physiological state in the coexisting community against changes in substrate quality, as inferred by the soil lipid profile, may be the mechanism underlying this positive diversity–stability relationship. Our experiment demonstrated that the previously found positive diversity–stability relationship could also be valid in the soil microbial community. Our results also imply that the functional/taxonomic diversity and community ecology of soil microbes should be incorporated into the context of climate–ecosystem feedbacks. Changes in substrate quality, which could be induced by climate change, have impacts on decomposition process and carbon dioxide emission from soils, but such impacts may be attenuated by the functional diversity of soil microbial communities.
Highlights
Soil microbial communities fundamentally drive decomposition processes by secreting extracellular enzymes, thereby playing potentially important roles in greenhouse gas emission, plant-soil interactions, nutrient cycling, and climate-ecosystem feedbacks [1,2,3,4]
We found that, in general, decomposition activities of the coexisting fungal-bacterial community were more stably maintained against variations in plant— substrate quality than those of either a fungal or bacterial community
The positive diversity–stability relationship found in this study is in accordance with what was found in the previous studies using aboveground systems [7,8,9] cautions should be taken for interpretation of the results shown in this study because our manipulations of microbial community were still very rough
Summary
Soil microbial communities fundamentally drive decomposition processes by secreting extracellular enzymes, thereby playing potentially important roles in greenhouse gas emission, plant-soil interactions, nutrient cycling, and climate-ecosystem feedbacks [1,2,3,4]. Little variation in the decomposition activity over an externally imposed change (or time period) would lead to the stable functioning of aboveground compartments of an ecosystem. Stability can be defined as how little the rate of a concerned process varied over an externally imposed change or time period, the term ‘‘stability’’ is a metaconcept that covers a wide range of different properties [6]. Positive correlations in diversity–stability relationships (e.g. temporal variation in productivity is smaller in a species-rich community than in a species-poor community) have often been reported in previous studies [8,12]. A large variation in the abundance of each species in species-rich communities is likely to stabilize community-level function by compensating for environmental fluctuations, and is thought to be the underlying mechanism of the positive correlations [8,12,13,14]
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