Chapter Five - Impacts of Climate Change on Soil Microbial Communities and Their Functioning

Abstract

Abstract Soil microbial communities perform many crucial ecosystem functions, but we still have no general framework for predicting their response to climate change. In this chapter, we provide an overview of the history of research into climate change impacts on soil microbial communities and summarize what is known about the effects of drought, warming, and elevated CO2 on soil microbial communities and their functioning. Based on this review of the literature, we propose a framework to predict microbial community response to climate change based on their functional traits. Oligotrophic or K-strategist microbial groups and taxa increase in abundance under drought and warming but decrease with elevated CO2. In contrast, copiotrophic or r-strategist groups rapidly regain their abundance after a pulse disturbance has ended. We also propose that specific functional genes might be more informative than broad growth strategies for predicting the response of microbial community composition to specific climate change drivers, and that functional genes involved in the C and N cycle can predict the consequences of changes in microbial community composition for soil functioning.