Temperature mediates continental-scale diversity of microbes in forest soils

By Jizhong Zhou, Ye Deng, Lina Shen, Chongqing Wen, Q. Yan, D. Ning, Yujia Qin, K. Xue, Liyou Wu, Zhili He and 10 more. Nature Communications, 2016

625 citations recorded by the source corpus.

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. Climate warming has a wide range of effects on biodiversity. Here, Zhou et al. show that although variation in environmental temperature is a primary driver of soil microbial biodiversity, microbes show much lower rates of turnover across temperature gradients than other major taxa.

Subfields: Ecological Modeling, Ecology, Molecular Biology

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/6e38b428bf85cbdadc9011ef17d7ff9f65464bf9

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Citations in the corpus

Rhizosphere-associated bacterial network structure and spatial distribution differ significantly from bulk soil in wheat crop fields (2017, background): “, 2007) and temperature (Zhou et al., 2016) also correlate with the distribution of bacterial communities in certain ecosystems.”
Meta-analysis of the impacts of global change factors on soil microbial diversity and functionality (2020, background): “They included oxidative C-cycling enzymes: (6) phenol oxidase (oxidize phenols using oxygen) and (7) peroxidase (oxidize aromatic and aliphatic hydrocarbons using peroxide); hydrolytic C-cycling enzymes: (8) α-1,4-glucosidase (starch degradation), (9) β-1,4glucosidase (hydrolyze glucose from cellobi”
Effects of Two Trichoderma Strains on Plant Growth, Rhizosphere Soil Nutrients, and Fungal Community of Pinus sylvestris var. mongolica Annual Seedlings (2019, methodology): “Additionally, the similarities analysis (ANOSIM) and heatmap analysis were calculated in the vegan package of R language [45,46] and the Unifrac distance calculation was performed for fungal beta diversity comparisons.”
Biogeographic patterns of microbial association networks in paddy soil within Eastern China (2020, background): “, 2017), and reinforced critical roles of temperature in controlling microbial growth, activities and diversity (Davidson and Janssens, 2006; Zhou et al., 2016).”
Plant diversity represents the prevalent determinant of soil fungal community structure across temperate grasslands in northern China (2017, result): “This finding is consistent with recent reports suggesting fungal beta diversity can be predicted by temperature over broad scales (Prober et al., 2015; Zhou et al., 2016), indicating that fundamental concepts such as metabolic theory may be suitable for soil fungi as well as plants.”
Scientists’ warning to humanity: microorganisms and climate change (2019, positive): “Substantial changes in bacterial and fungal communities were also found in forest soils with a more than 20 °C average annual temperature range 177 , and in response to warming across a 9-year study of tall-grass prairie soils 178 .”
Soil organic matter availability and climate drive latitudinal patterns in bacterial diversity from tropical to cold temperate forests (2018, background): “, 2010; Fierer & Jackson, 2006; Lauber, Hamady, Knight, & Fierer, 2009), vegetation (Peay, Baraloto, & Fine, 2013), temperature (Zhou et al., 2016), and aridity (Wang et al.”