The role of multiple global change factors in driving soil functions and microbial biodiversity
By Matthias C. Rillig, M. Ryo, A. Lehmann, C. Aguilar‐Trigueros, Sabine Buchert, A. Wulf, A. Iwasaki, J. Roy, Gaowen Yang. Science, 2019
730 citations recorded by the source corpus.
Many factors influence global change Global environmental change is driven by multiple natural and anthropogenic factors. With a focus on global change as it affects soils, Rillig et al. point out that nearly all published studies consider just one or two factors at a time (see the Perspective by Manning). In a laboratory experiment, they tested 10 drivers of global change both individually and in combination, at levels ranging from 2 to 10 factors. They found that soil properties, processes, and microbial communities could not be predicted from single-effect responses and that multiple factors in combination produced unsuspected responses. They concluded that single-factor studies remain important for uncovering mechanisms but that global change biology needs to embrace more fully the multitude of drivers impinging on ecosystems. Science, this issue p. 886; see also p. 801 A combination of global change factors can predict trends of ecosystem reactions, soil properties, and microbial communities. Soils underpin terrestrial ecosystem functions, but they face numerous anthropogenic pressures. Despite their crucial ecological role, we know little about how soils react to more than two environmental factors at a time. Here, we show experimentally that increasing the number of simultaneous global change factors (up to 10) caused increasing directional changes in soil properties, soil processes, and microbial communities, though there was greater uncertainty in predicting the magnitude of change. Our study provides a blueprint for addressing multifactor change with an efficient, broadly applicable experimental design for studying the impacts of global environmental change.
Subfields: Ecology, Global and Planetary Change, Soil Science
View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6b5f5928e5e7606b32ea9af422aba19b157abd6a
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Citations in the corpus
- Microplastic fiber and drought effects on plants and soil are only slightly modified by arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi (2020, background): “Previous work (Machado et al., 2019) has revealed that plant performance can be positively affected by microplastic presence in the soil, most strikingly by the presence of microplastic fibers, likely as a consequence of their linear shape (Rillig et al., 2019b).”