Plant diversity increases soil microbial activity and soil carbon storage

By M. Lange, N. Eisenhauer, C. Sierra, H. Bessler, C. Engels, R. Griffiths, P. Mellado-Vázquez, A. Malik, J. Roy, S. Scheu and 4 more. Nature Communications, 2015

1,473 citations recorded by the source corpus.

Plant diversity strongly influences ecosystem functions and services, such as soil carbon storage. However, the mechanisms underlying the positive plant diversity effects on soil carbon storage are poorly understood. We explored this relationship using long-term data from a grassland biodiversity experiment (The Jena Experiment) and radiocarbon (14C) modelling. Here we show that higher plant diversity increases rhizosphere carbon inputs into the microbial community resulting in both increased microbial activity and carbon storage. Increases in soil carbon were related to the enhanced accumulation of recently fixed carbon in high-diversity plots, while plant diversity had less pronounced effects on the decomposition rate of existing carbon. The present study shows that elevated carbon storage at high plant diversity is a direct function of the soil microbial community, indicating that the increase in carbon storage is mainly limited by the integration of new carbon into soil and less by the decomposition of existing soil carbon. The mechanisms driving soil carbon storage, one of the largest stores of terrestrial carbon, remain poorly understood. Here, the authors present data from the long-term Jena Experiment on grassland biodiversity, showing that elevated carbon storage at high plant diversity is a direct function of increased soil microbial activity.

Subfields: Ecology, Nature and Landscape Conservation, Soil Science

View Paper: https://www.semanticscholar.org/paper/dc8f11899d8a0b6a056ccd52a2fcae75485fb429

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Citations in the corpus

Effects of past and current drought on the composition and diversity of soil microbial communities (2019, background): “soil microbial biomass and activity due to inputs of organic matter and the regulation of soil moisture (Zak et al., 2003; Lange et al., 2015; Thakur et al., 2015).”
Understanding biodiversity-ecosystem service relationships in urban areas: A comprehensive literature review (2017, neutral): “…that both taxonomic and functional aspects of biodiversity underpin ecosystem functioning and service delivery in grasslands (e.g. Isbell et al. 2011; Lange et al. 2015; Wright et al. 2017), forests (Verheyen et al. 2016), created wetlands (Means et al. 2016) and mesocosms (Bilá et al. 2014).”
Linking 3D Soil Structure and Plant-Microbe-Soil Carbon Transfer in the Rhizosphere (2018, background): “Enhancing rhizosphere processes, such as C transfer from roots to microorganisms and soil, can increase soil C storage (White et al., 2013; Lange et al., 2015), one of the challenges of the Twenty-firstt century to mitigate climate change (Lal, 2004; Lehmann, 2007).”
Forest biodiversity, ecosystem functioning and the provision of ecosystem services (2017, background): “For soils, Lange et al. (2015) found that elevated carbon storage at sites with high plant diversity is directly related to the soil microbial functional community (i.e., soil biodiversity), which in turn is related to plant species richness, suggesting that soil carbon storage is mainly limited by…”
How Deep Can Surface Signals Be Traced in the Critical Zone? Merging Biodiversity with Biogeochemistry Research in a Central German Muschelkalk Landscape (2016, background): “As the duration of these experiments increases, so does our knowledge of these measurable effects of plant diversity on soil organisms (Eisenhauer et al., 2011) and functions like soil organic matter storage (Lange et al., 2015).”
Effects of plant community history, soil legacy and plant diversity on soil microbial communities (2020, background): “Contrary to our findings, others previously found that plant species richness increased bacterial diversity in the Jena Experiment (Lange et al., 2015), as well as in other grassland biodiversity experiments (Bartelt-Ryser et al.”