Abstract
Soil microbial communities are intricately linked to ecosystem functioning because they play important roles in carbon and nitrogen cycling. Still, we know little about how soil microbial communities will be affected by disturbances expected with climate change. This is a significant gap in understanding, as the stability of microbial communities, defined as a community's ability to resist and recover from disturbances, likely has consequences for ecosystem function. Here, we propose a framework for predicting a community's response to climate change, based on specific functional traits present in the community, the relative dominance of r- and K-strategists, and the soil environment. We hypothesize that the relative abundance of r- and K-strategists will inform about a community's resistance and resilience to climate change associated disturbances. We also propose that other factors specific to soils, such as moisture content and the presence of plants, may enhance a community's resilience. For example, recent evidence suggests microbial grazers, resource availability, and plant roots each impact on microbial community stability. We explore these hypotheses by offering three vignettes of published data that we re-analyzed. Our results show that community measures of the relative abundance of r- and K-strategists, as well as environmental properties like resource availability and the abundance and diversity of higher trophic levels, can contribute to explaining the response of microbial community composition to climate change-related disturbances. However, further investigation and experimental validation is necessary to directly test these hypotheses across a wide range of soil ecosystems.
Highlights
Soil microbial communities are intricately linked to ecosystem functioning because they play important roles in carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) cycling, and feed back to plant communities as mutualists and pathogens (Van der Heijden et al, 2008)
We argue that the fungal/bacterial ratio of a soil microbial community may be indicative of the prevalence of K-strategists in that community, and, following this, the resistance of microbial community structure will increase with increasing fungi-to-bacteria (F/B) ratio, or increasing relative abundance of fungi, whereas the resilience will decrease
We propose that the abundance of specific functional genes such as those involved in desiccation resistance will predict a community’s response to drought, but genes involved in C and N cycling might link to the r-K spectrum and be useful for predicting microbial community response to climate change (Table 1; Figure 2)
Summary
Soil microbial communities are intricately linked to ecosystem functioning because they play important roles in carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) cycling, and feed back to plant communities as mutualists and pathogens (Van der Heijden et al, 2008). Drawing from findings from both terrestrial and aquatic systems, we formulate hypotheses on the controls of resistance and resilience of microbial communities in soil, focusing on disturbances associated with climate change (Box 1). Most evidence for relationships between microbial communities and stability (resistance or resilience under disturbance) comes from aquatic microcosm studies (e.g., Wertz et al, 2007; Wittebolle et al, 2009; Eisenhauer et al, 2012) The majority of these studies have focused on the stability of processes or bulk microbial properties (e.g., biomass or functioning) under disturbance, rather than the stability of community structure itself. Specific functional traits (Box 1) may be more informative of community stability in disturbed ecosystems than community composition and structure (Lennon et al, 2012; Wallenstein and Hall, 2012; Mouillot et al, 2013). The presence and expression of specific functional genes in soil microbial communities has been shown to respond to global change and climate change disturbances (e.g., Baldrian et al, 2012; Yergeau et al, 2012; Yarwood et al, 2013), the relative abundance of functional genes has never been used
Sign-in/Register to view highlights & summary Sign-in/Register to access full text options 
Talk to us
Join us for a 30 min session where you can share your feedback and ask us any queries you have
Schedule a callDisclaimer: All third-party content on this website/platform is and will remain the property of their respective owners and is provided on "as is" basis without any warranties, express or implied. Use of third-party content does not indicate any affiliation, sponsorship with or endorsement by them. Any references to third-party content is to identify the corresponding services and shall be considered fair use under The CopyrightLaw.
