Abstract
Climate change is altering the frequency and severity of drought events. Recent evidence indicates that drought may produce legacy effects on soil microbial communities. However, it is unclear whether precedent drought events lead to ecological memory formation, i.e., the capacity of past events to influence current ecosystem response trajectories. Here, we utilize a long-term field experiment in a mountain grassland in central Austria with an experimental layout comparing 10 years of recurrent drought events to a single drought event and ambient conditions. We show that recurrent droughts increase the dissimilarity of microbial communities compared to control and single drought events, and enhance soil multifunctionality during drought (calculated via measurements of potential enzymatic activities, soil nutrients, microbial biomass stoichiometry and belowground net primary productivity). Our results indicate that soil microbial community composition changes in concert with its functioning, with consequences for soil processes. The formation of ecological memory in soil under recurrent drought may enhance the resilience of ecosystem functioning against future drought events.
Highlights
Climate change is altering the frequency and severity of drought events
The experiment reduced soil water content throughout the experimental period (Supplementary Fig. 1, Supplementary Table 1 and Supplementary Fig. 2), with no differences between plots subjected to 10 years of recurrent drought events (10-year treatment) and plots exposed to a single drought event (1-year treatment)
Our communities were well-characterized with regard to placement of amplicon sequence variants (ASVs) in the perdefault reference tree, as indicated by the weighted nearest sequenced taxon index (NSTI)
Summary
Climate change is altering the frequency and severity of drought events. Recent evidence indicates that drought may produce legacy effects on soil microbial communities. On the contrary, when drought was simulated as an intense stress event, it had significant long-lasting legacy effects on the microbial community, altering soil–plant feedback with changes in plant growth, nutrient acquisition, belowground C allocation and ecosystem functioning[11,13,15,16,17]. Additional soil data available at this site for plots subjected to 1, 2, 3, 4 and 5 years of recurrent summer drought events (data obtained in 2011 and 2012) is analysed to understand the temporal aspects leading to an ecological memory development To our knowledge, this is the first study that provides an integrative analysis of an ecological memory formation caused by recurrent drought events on the soil biogeochemical cycles mediated by the soil microbial community. We further suggest that microbial community shifts and changes in the microbially mediated cycling of carbon and nutrients likely reflect communitydependent strategies to acclimate to drought, and likely controlling soil functions
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