Abstract
Communities of soil microorganisms (soil microbiomes) play a major role in biogeochemical cycles and support of plant growth. Here we focus primarily on the roles that the soil microbiome plays in cycling soil organic carbon and the impact of climate change on the soil carbon cycle. We first discuss current challenges in understanding the roles carried out by highly diverse and heterogeneous soil microbiomes and review existing knowledge gaps in understanding how climate change will impact soil carbon cycling by the soil microbiome. Because soil microbiome stability is a key metric to understand as the climate changes, we discuss different aspects of stability, including resistance, resilience, and functional redundancy.We then review recent research pertaining to the impact of major climate perturbations on the soil microbiome and the functions that they carry out. Finally, we review new experimental methodologies and modeling approaches under development that should facilitate our understanding of the complex nature of the soil microbiome to better predict its future responses to climate change.
Highlights
We review recent research pertaining to the impact of major climate perturbations on the soil microbiome and the functions that they carry out
A central challenge in predicting climate change effects is integrating predictions derived from models across different scales of resolution. (a) Landscape-scale models couple hydrologic, climatic, and soil-ecosystem models [198]. (b) Soil carbon models (e.g., 158) integrate simulations of overall microbial activity and greenhouse gas flux from aboveground, surface, and subsurface soil horizons. (c) Agent-based models, which detail processes occurring at the microbial population scale, allow for both elucidation of what properties of a system are attributable to individual groups of microbes and what are emergent [169, 199, 200]. (d) Molecular pathways/metabolic maps can be used to model soil microbial phylogenetic and phenotypic responses to change, including elucidating which metabolic pathways are represented in a soil system and the rates at which they occur
A recent call to action emphasized the importance of understanding environmental microorganisms in the face of climate change [2]
Summary
Soil ecosystems are highly complex and subject to different landscape-scale perturbations that govern whether soil carbon is retained or released to the atmosphere [5]. A mere fraction of soil microbial life has been catalogued to date, new soil microbes [7] and viruses are increasingly being discovered [8] This lack of knowledge results in uncertainty of the contribution of soil microorganisms to SOC cycling and hinders construction of accurate predictive models for global carbon flux under climate change [9]. Refining approaches to focus on function is anticipated to aid model construction through more accurate assessment of real-world processes Another challenge is accounting for the chemistry and physical structure of soils themselves, both of which influence SOC decomposition. Comprehensive comparisons of SOC decomposition profiles across different soil types and structures are necessary to better understand soil microbial metabolism and carbon flux
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