Microbial resistance and resilience to drought across a European climate gradient

Abstract

Drought and rainfall events will become more frequent and intense with climate change. At the same time, soil moisture is one of the major factors controlling soil microbial processes such as carbon cycling. When challenged with drought there are two main growth responses microorganisms can use: (1) they can maintain growth rates during drought (i.e., resistance) and (2) they can recover growth rates faster when the drought ends (i.e., resilience). Microbial communities are shaped by multiple other factors in the soil environment, however how those impact drought responses remain unclear. Here we investigate how climate (estimated as aridity index) and soil properties determine microbial growth resistance and resilience to drought across a climate gradient in Europe. To test this, we exposed the different soils to a standardised drought cycle in controlled conditions. We assessed bacterial growth, fungal growth and respiration during soil drying to determine resistance and in high resolution during three days after rewetting to estimate resilience to drought. We found that alpha diversity was the strongest driver of both bacterial drought resistance and resilience, which occurred via changes in soil pH. This shows the importance of diversity for sustaining bacterial functions during drought stress. A secondary driver of bacterial drought resistance and resilience was the aridity index was also an important driver, where bacterial communities from more arid climates had higher resistance and resilience to drought. Fungal communities were both more resistant and resilient compared to bacteria, but this was independent of other measured environmental factors. Bacterial resilience was partly linked with differences in community composition. Our results suggest that if sites are exposed to increased aridity due to climate change or are managed to promote bacterial diversity, they will have higher bacterial growth rates during drought perturbations, which could potentially promote soil carbon storage.