Land use driven change in soil pH affects microbial carbon cycling processes

By A. Malik, J. Puissant, Kate M. Buckeridge, T. Goodall, N. Jehmlich, S. Chowdhury, H. Gweon, J. Peyton, Kelly E. Mason, M. van Agtmaal and 7 more. Nature Communications, 2018

799 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Soil microorganisms act as gatekeepers for soil–atmosphere carbon exchange by balancing the accumulation and release of soil organic matter. However, poor understanding of the mechanisms responsible hinders the development of effective land management strategies to enhance soil carbon storage. Here we empirically test the link between microbial ecophysiological traits and topsoil carbon content across geographically distributed soils and land use contrasts. We discovered distinct pH controls on microbial mechanisms of carbon accumulation. Land use intensification in low-pH soils that increased the pH above a threshold (~6.2) leads to carbon loss through increased decomposition, following alleviation of acid retardation of microbial growth. However, loss of carbon with intensification in near-neutral pH soils was linked to decreased microbial biomass and reduced growth efficiency that was, in turn, related to trade-offs with stress alleviation and resource acquisition. Thus, less-intensive management practices in near-neutral pH soils have more potential for carbon storage through increased microbial growth efficiency, whereas in acidic soils, microbial growth is a bigger constraint on decomposition rates. Land use intensification could modify microbial activity and thus ecosystem function. Here, Malik et al. sample microbes and carbon-related functions across a land use gradient, demonstrating that microbial biomass and carbon use efficiency are reduced in human-impacted near-neutral pH soils.

Subfields: Ecology, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/b08d8fd827e35956037eb038ca24be35330c6122

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Citations in the corpus

Microbial carbon use efficiency promotes global soil carbon storage (2023, methodology): “For example, the system-level CUE (CUE system ) was calculated by weighting CUE values from three litter and one dissolved organic carbon (DOC) assimilation pathways with their respective fluxes (equation (10) in Methods).”
Defining trait-based microbial strategies with consequences for soil carbon cycling under climate change (2018, positive): “However, the strength of the growth rate-yield tradeoff is somewhat inconsistent across individual, population, and community levels (Malik et al., 2018; Muscarella and Lennon, 2018; Roller et al., 2016; Van Bodegom, 2007).”