Temperature mediates continental-scale diversity of microbes in forest soils.

Jizhong Zhou,Ye Deng,Chongqing Wen,Qingyun Yan,Vanessa Buzzard,Zhili He,James W Voordeckers,Michael D Weiser,Michael Kaspari,Sean T Michaletz,Daliang Ning,Yunfeng Yang,Brian J Enquist,Liyou Wu,Kai Xue,James H Brown,Joy D Van Nostrand,Yujia Qin,Robert B Waide ,Lei Shen

doi:10.1038/ncomms12083

Abstract

Climate warming is increasingly leading to marked changes in plant and animal biodiversity, but it remains unclear how temperatures affect microbial biodiversity, particularly in terrestrial soils. Here we show that, in accordance with metabolic theory of ecology, taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity of soil bacteria, fungi and nitrogen fixers are all better predicted by variation in environmental temperature than pH. However, the rates of diversity turnover across the global temperature gradients are substantially lower than those recorded for trees and animals, suggesting that the diversity of plant, animal and soil microbial communities show differential responses to climate change. To the best of our knowledge, this is the first study demonstrating that the diversity of different microbial groups has significantly lower rates of turnover across temperature gradients than other major taxa, which has important implications for assessing the effects of human-caused changes in climate, land use and other factors.

Highlights

Climate warming is increasingly leading to marked changes in plant and animal biodiversity, but it remains unclear how temperatures affect microbial biodiversity, in terrestrial soils
metabolic theory of ecology (MTE) predicts that the metabolism of individuals, the population growth rate and the number of species increase exponentially with the environmental temperature (R / e À E=kT )[7,10], where R is the rate of some process such as metabolism, population growth or speciation, e is the base of the natural logarithm, E is the ‘activation energy’ that characterizes the temperature dependence of a given biological process, k is Boltzmann’s constant and T is temperature in kelvin
Because the changes in ecosystem process rates are dependent on the changes in metabolic demands of individual organisms, it is expected that temperature should have a profound influence on ecological community structure, and MTE should provide a powerful framework for predicting the effects of climate warming on biodiversity and ecosystem processes[6,7,11]

Summary

Introduction

Climate warming is increasingly leading to marked changes in plant and animal biodiversity, but it remains unclear how temperatures affect microbial biodiversity, in terrestrial soils. The rates of diversity turnover across the global temperature gradients are substantially lower than those recorded for trees and animals, suggesting that the diversity of plant, animal and soil microbial communities show differential responses to climate change. The metabolic theory of ecology (MTE)[7,8] starts from first principles of biophysics to scale up the kinetic effects of temperature on metabolism to rates of evolution, community structure, gradients of diversity and ecosystem processes[9]. Because the changes in ecosystem process rates are dependent on the changes in metabolic demands of individual organisms, it is expected that temperature should have a profound influence on ecological community structure, and MTE should provide a powerful framework for predicting the effects of climate warming on biodiversity and ecosystem processes[6,7,11]. Our results indicate that the temperature is a primary driver in shaping soil microbial community in the forest soils and microbial groups has significantly lower rates of turnover across the temperature gradients than plants

Methods

Results

Conclusion