Climate change will lead to pronounced shifts in the diversity of soil microbial communities

Soil bacteria are key to ecosystem function and maintenance of soil fertility. Leveraging associations of current geographic distributions of bacteria with historic climate, we predict that soil bacterial diversity will increase across the majority (~70%) of the Tibetan Plateau and northern North America if bacterial communities equilibrate with existing climatic conditions. This prediction is possible because the current distributions of soil bacteria have stronger correlations with climate from ~50 years ago than with current climate. This lag is likely associated with the time it takes for soil properties to adjust to changes in climate. The predicted changes are location specific and differ across bacterial taxa, including some bacteria that are predicted to have reductions in their distributions. These findings demonstrate the widespread influence that climate change will have on belowground diversity and highlight the importance of considering bacterial communities when assessing climate impacts on terrestrial ecosystems.

[1]  P. Reich,et al.  Climate legacies drive global soil carbon stocks in terrestrial ecosystems , 2017, Science Advances.

[2]  C. Hawkes,et al.  Historical precipitation predictably alters the shape and magnitude of microbial functional response to soil moisture , 2016, Global change biology.

[3]  C. Hawkes,et al.  Historical and current climate drive spatial and temporal patterns in fungal endophyte diversity , 2016 .

[4]  Jizhong Zhou,et al.  Elevated carbon dioxide accelerates the spatial turnover of soil microbial communities , 2016, Global change biology.

[5]  T. Keitt,et al.  Resilience vs. historical contingency in microbial responses to environmental change. , 2015, Ecology letters.

[6]  T. Crowther,et al.  Predicting the responsiveness of soil biodiversity to deforestation: a cross‐biome study , 2014, Global change biology.

[7]  Davey L. Jones,et al.  Investigating the long‐term legacy of drought and warming on the soil microbial community across five European shrubland ecosystems , 2013, Global change biology.

[8]  Rob Knight,et al.  Reconstructing the Microbial Diversity and Function of Pre-Agricultural Tallgrass Prairie Soils in the United States , 2013, Science.

[9]  J. Svenning,et al.  Disequilibrium vegetation dynamics under future climate change. , 2013, American journal of botany.

[10]  Ruth M. Potrafka,et al.  Temperature Drives the Continental-Scale Distribution of Key Microbes in Topsoil Communities , 2013, Science.

[11]  N. Fierer,et al.  A Cross-Taxon Analysis of Insect-Associated Bacterial Diversity , 2013, PloS one.

[12]  A. Kinzig,et al.  The Functional Consequences of Biodiversity: Empirical Progress and Theoretical Extensions (MPB-33) , 2013 .

[13]  C. Plutzar,et al.  Extinction debt of high-mountain plants under twenty-first-century climate change , 2012 .

[14]  M. Wallenstein,et al.  Soil microbial community response to drying and rewetting stress: does historical precipitation regime matter? , 2012, Biogeochemistry.

[15]  K. Cuddington.  Legacy Effects: The Persistent Impact of Ecological Interactions , 2011 .

[16]  Li Na,et al.  Plant production, and carbon and nitrogen source pools, are strongly intensified by experimental warming in alpine ecosystems in the Qinghai-Tibet Plateau , 2011 .

[17]  Steven J. Phillips,et al.  The art of modelling range‐shifting species , 2010 .

[18]  Pete Smith,et al.  Microorganisms and climate change: terrestrial feedbacks and mitigation options , 2010, Nature Reviews Microbiology.

[19]  Rob Knight,et al.  Soil bacterial diversity in the Arctic is not fundamentally different from that found in other biomes. , 2010, Environmental microbiology.

[20]  W. Whitman,et al.  The ecological coherence of high bacterial taxonomic ranks , 2010, Nature Reviews Microbiology.

[21]  M. Garnett,et al.  Soil biology and warming play a key role in the release of 'old C' from organic soils , 2010 .

[22]  William A. Walters,et al.  QIIME allows analysis of high-throughput community sequencing data , 2010, Nature Methods.

[23]  P. Grogan,et al.  Soil microbial biomass, nutrient availability and nitrogen mineralization potential among vegetation-types in a low arctic tundra landscape , 2010, Plant and Soil.

[24]  N. Fierer,et al.  Landscape-level variation in temperature sensitivity of soil organic carbon decomposition , 2010 .

[25]  J. Thioulouse,et al.  Biogeographical patterns of soil bacterial communities. , 2009, Environmental Microbiology Reports.

[26]  R. Knight,et al.  Pyrosequencing-Based Assessment of Soil pH as a Predictor of Soil Bacterial Community Structure at the Continental Scale , 2009, Applied and Environmental Microbiology.

[27]  S. Frey,et al.  Thermal adaptation of soil microbial respiration to elevated temperature. , 2008, Ecology letters.

[28]  Christopher von Nagy,et al.  Prolonged suppression of ecosystem carbon dioxide uptake after an anomalously warm year , 2008, Nature.

[29]  Yanhong Tang,et al.  Storage, patterns and controls of soil organic carbon in the Tibetan grasslands , 2008 .

[30]  Yiqi Luo,et al.  Rates of litter decomposition in terrestrial ecosystems: global patterns and controlling factors , 2008 .

[31]  Susan M. Huse,et al.  Accuracy and quality of massively parallel DNA pyrosequencing , 2007, Genome Biology.

[32]  J. Lamarque,et al.  Nitrogen and sulfur deposition on regional and global scales: A multimodel evaluation , 2006 .

[33]  C. Parmesan.  Ecological and Evolutionary Responses to Recent Climate Change , 2006 .

[34]  Noah Fierer,et al.  Predicting the temperature dependence of microbial respiration in soil: A continental‐scale analysis , 2006 .

[35]  D. Wardle.  The influence of biotic interactions on soil biodiversity. , 2006, Ecology letters.

[36]  Philip Hugenholtz,et al.  NAST: a multiple sequence alignment server for comparative analysis of 16S rRNA genes , 2006, Nucleic Acids Res..

[37]  D. Roy,et al.  Species richness changes lag behind climate change , 2006, Proceedings of the Royal Society B: Biological Sciences.

[38]  S. Schneider,et al.  Fingerprints of global warming on wild animals and plants , 2003, Nature.

[39]  Cheng Guodong,et al.  Soil organic carbon pool of grassland soils on the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau and its global implication. , 2002, The Science of the total environment.

[40]  O. Chadwick,et al.  The chemistry of pedogenic thresholds , 2001 .

[41]  P. Jones,et al.  Representing Twentieth-Century Space-Time Climate Variability. Part II: Development of 1901-96 Monthly Grids of Terrestrial Surface Climate , 2000 .

[42]  Mark Rounsevell,et al.  Climate Change and Agricultural Soils: Impacts and Adaptation , 1999 .

[43]  O. Chadwick,et al.  The Effect of Plants on Mineral Weathering , 1998 .

[44]  M. Nowak,et al.  Habitat destruction and the extinction debt , 1994, Nature.

[45]  C. Körner,et al.  Arctic and Alpine Biodiversity: Patterns, Causes and Ecosystem Consequences , 1994, Ecological Studies.

[46]  I. Burke,et al.  Is bacterial moisture niche a good predictor of shifts in community composition under long-term drought? , 2014, Ecology.

[47]  Robert C. Edgar,et al.  Search and clustering orders of magnitude faster than BLAST , 2010 .

[48]  J. Schimel.  Ecosystem Consequences of Microbial Diversity and Community Structure , 1995 .