Climate warming leads to divergent succession of grassland microbial communities

• Published in: Nature climate change Vol. 8; no. 9; pp. 813 - 818
• Main Authors: Guo, Xue, Feng, Jiajie, Shi, Zhou, Zhou, Xishu, Yuan, Mengting, Tao, Xuanyu, Hale, Lauren, Yuan, Tong, Wang, Jianjun, Qin, Yujia, Zhou, Aifen, Fu, Ying, Wu, Liyou, He, Zhili, Van Nostrand, Joy D., Ning, Daliang, Liu, Xueduan, Luo, Yiqi, Tiedje, James M., Yang, Yunfeng, Zhou, Jizhong
• Format: Journal Article
• Language: English
• Published: London Nature Publishing Group UK 01.09.2018; Nature Publishing Group
• Subjects: 631/158/2452; 631/158/855; 704/106/694/2739/2807; Bacteria; Climate Change; Climate change scenarios; Climate Change/Climate Change Impacts; Climate effects; Community structure; Composition; Decay; Earth and Environmental Science; Ecological effects; Ecological succession; Environment; Environmental Law/Policy/Ecojustice; Filtration; Fungi; Future climates; Global warming; Grasslands; Letter; Microbial activity; Microorganisms; Phylogeny; Soil; Soil microorganisms; Stochastic models; Stochastic processes; Stochasticity
• ISSN: 1758-678X; 1758-6798
• DOI: 10.1038/s41558-018-0254-2

Accurate climate projections require an understanding of the effects of warming on ecological communities and the underlying mechanisms that drive them 1 – 3 . However, little is known about the effects of climate warming on the succession of microbial communities 4 , 5 . Here we examined the temporal succession of soil microbes in a long-term climate change experiment at a tall-grass prairie ecosystem. Experimental warming was found to significantly alter the community structure of bacteria and fungi. By determining the time-decay relationships and the paired differences of microbial communities under warming and ambient conditions, experimental warming was shown to lead to increasingly divergent succession of the soil microbial communities, with possibly higher impacts on fungi than bacteria. Variation partition- and null model-based analyses indicate that stochastic processes played larger roles than deterministic ones in explaining microbial community taxonomic and phylogenetic compositions. However, in warmed soils, the relative importance of stochastic processes decreased over time, indicating a potential deterministic environmental filtering elicited by warming. Although successional trajectories of microbial communities are difficult to predict under future climate change scenarios, their composition and structure are projected to be less variable due to warming-driven selection. Experimental warming at a tall-grass prairie significantly altered bacteria and fungi community structure. Under climate change microbial community composition and structure are projected to be less variable due to warming-driven selection.