Microbial communities and their relevance for ecosystem models: Decomposition as a case study

By K. McGuire, K. Treseder. 2010

414 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Soil microbial communities are so vastly diverse that complex interactions, which alter ecosystem functions, may occur among microbial species and functional groups. In this review, we explore the empirical evidence for situations when shifts in the community structure of microbes would elicit a change in ecosystem process rates, specifically decomposition, even when microbial biomass remains constant. In particular, we are interested in a subset of these scenarios in which knowledge of microbial community structure would improve model predictions for ecosystem functions. Results from microcosm and field studies indicate that microbial species diversity, functional group diversity, and community composition can all influence ecosystem process rates. The underlying mechanisms that may elicit changes in ecosystem functions from shifts in microbial community structure include evolutionary constraints on microbial trait adaptation, trait correlations, dispersal limitation, and species interactions. The extent of microbial diversity in soils is not known, so it is presently not possible to model all scenarios of microbial community structure shifts. However, by incorporating documented patterns in functional groups that are relevant for a particular ecosystem process and potential relationships between microbial phylogeny and function, the predictive power of process models will be significantly improved. The inclusion of this information into process models is critical for predicting and understanding how ecosystem functions may shift in response to global change.

Subfields: Ecology, Molecular Biology, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dbcbe444510042a922444360192cd02495e25574

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In Molecular Biology

In Soil Science

Citations in the corpus

Temporal dynamics of microbial communities on decomposing leaf litter of 10 plant species in relation to decomposition rate (2012, background): “As ability to metabolize labile carbon is believed to be ubiquitous among microbes (McGuire and Treseder, 2010; Paterson et al., 2008; Poll et al., 2008), the lack of correlation between microbial community composition and decomposition rate may be due to the ability of all microbes present early…”
Integrating microbial ecology into ecosystem models: challenges and priorities (2012, background): “, decomposition of recalcitrant versus labile compounds) are phylogenetically distributed? In addition, explicit incorporation of functional groups into ecosystem models may most likely improve model predictions where microbial species interactions or dispersal limitation of microbial species influe”
Meta-analysis reveals ammonia-oxidizing bacteria respond more strongly to nitrogen addition than ammonia-oxidizing archaea (2016, background): “…of ecosystem dynamics in areas that receive elevated N inputs may be improved by explicitly including trait- based microbial data, such as niche preferences for N availability, in predictive biogeochemical models (McGuire and Treseder, 2010; Treseder et al., 2011; Nazaries et al., 2013).”
Using microbial communities and extracellular enzymes to link soil organic matter characteristics to greenhouse gas production in a tidal freshwater wetland (2014, background): “2000) that can utilize a limited range of organic substrates, there is relatively low functional redundancy associated with CH4 production and the contribution of individual species to overall ecosystem function should be more important (Allison and Martiny 2008; McGuire and Treseder 2010).”
The effect of resource history on the functioning of soil microbial communities is maintained across time (2011, background): “…flexibility and rapid evolution, soil microbial communities are traditionally assumed to be functionally similar with regard to broad-physiological processes such as the decomposition of organic carbon (Allison and Martiny, 2008; Schimel, 1995; Green et al., 2008; McGuire and Treseder, 2010).”