Warming enhances old organic carbon decomposition through altering functional microbial communities

Journal Article · Fri Apr 21 00:00:00 EDT 2017 · The ISME Journal

DOI:https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2017.48· OSTI ID:1408455

Cheng, Lei ^[1]; Zhang, Naifang ^[2]; Yuan, Mengting ^[3]; Xiao, Jing ^[2]; Qin, Yujia ^[3]; Deng, Ye ^[3]; Tu, Qichao ^[3]; Xue, Kai ^[3]; Van Nostrand, Joy D. ^[3]; Wu, Liyou ^[3]; He, Zhili ^[3]; Zhou, Xuhui ^[4]; Leigh, Mary Beth ^[5]; Konstantinidis, Konstantinos T. ^[6]; Schuur, Edward AG ^[7]; Luo, Yiqi ^[8]; Tiedje, James M. ^[9]; Zhou, Jizhong ^[10]

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1. Zhejian Univ., Hangzhou (China). Key Lab of Conservation Biology for Endangered Wildlife of the Ministry of Education; Univ. of Oklahoma, Norman, OK (United States). Dept. of Microbiology and Plant Biology, Inst. for Environmental Genomics
2. Zhejian Univ., Hangzhou (China). Key Lab of Conservation Biology for Endangered Wildlife of the Ministry of Education
3. Univ. of Oklahoma, Norman, OK (United States). Dept. of Microbiology and Plant Biology, Inst. for Environmental Genomics
4. East China Normal Univ. (ECNU), Shanghai (China). Center ofr Global Change and Ecological Forecasting
5. Univ. of Alaska, Fairbanks, AK (United States). Inst. of Arctic Biology
6. Georgia Inst. of Technology, Atlanta, GA (United States). Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics
7. Northern Arizona Univ., Flagstaff, AZ (United States). Center for Ecoystem Science and Society
8. Univ. of Oklahoma, Norman, OK (United States). Dept. of Microbiology and Plant Biology
9. Michigan State Univ., East Lansing, MI (United States). Center for Microbial Ecology
10. Univ. of Oklahoma, Norman, OK (United States). Dept. of Microbiology and Plant Biology, Inst. for Environmental Genomics, School of Civil Engineering and Environmental SCiences; Tsinghua Univ., Beijing (China). State Key Joint Lab. of Environment Simulation and Pollution Control; Lawrence Berkeley National Lab. (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States). Earth and Environmental Sciences

Soil organic matter (SOM) stocks contain nearly three times as much carbon (C) as the atmosphere and changes in soil C stocks may have a major impact on future atmospheric carbon dioxide concentrations and climate. Over the past two decades, much research has been devoted to examining the influence of warming on SOM decomposition in topsoil. Most SOM, however, is old and stored in subsoil. The fate of subsoil SOM under future warming remains highly uncertain. Here, by combining a long-term field warming experiment and a meta-analysis study, we showed that warming significantly increased SOM decomposition in subsoil. We also showed that a decade of warming promoted decomposition of subsoil SOM with turnover times of decades to millennia in a tall grass prairie and this effect was largely associated with shifts in the functional gene structure of microbial communities. By coupling stable isotope probing with metagenomics, we found that microbial communities in warmed soils possessed a higher relative abundance of key functional genes involved in the degradation of organic materials with varying recalcitrance than those in control soils. These findings suggest warming may considerably alter the stability of the vast pool of old SOM in subsoil, contributing to the long-term positive feedback between the C cycle and climate.

• Research Organization: Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
• Sponsoring Organization: USDOE Office of Science (SC)
• Grant/Contract Number: AC02-05CH11231; SC0004601; SC0010715
• OSTI ID: 1408455
• Journal Information: The ISME Journal, Vol. 11, Issue 8; ISSN 1751-7362
• Publisher: Nature Publishing Group
• Country of Publication: United States
• Language: English

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54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES
climate-change ecology