Warming enhances old organic carbon decomposition through altering functional microbial communities
Abstract
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-termmore »
- Authors:
-
- 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
- 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
- East China Normal Univ. (ECNU), Shanghai (China). Center ofr Global Change and Ecological Forecasting
- Univ. of Alaska, Fairbanks, AK (United States). Inst. of Arctic Biology
- Georgia Inst. of Technology, Atlanta, GA (United States). Center for Bioinformatics and Computational Genomics
- Northern Arizona Univ., Flagstaff, AZ (United States). Center for Ecoystem Science and Society
- Univ. of Oklahoma, Norman, OK (United States). Dept. of Microbiology and Plant Biology
- Michigan State Univ., East Lansing, MI (United States). Center for Microbial Ecology
- 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
- Publication Date:
- Research Org.:
- Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory (LBNL), Berkeley, CA (United States)
- Sponsoring Org.:
- USDOE Office of Science (SC)
- OSTI Identifier:
- 1408455
- Grant/Contract Number:
- AC02-05CH11231; SC0004601; SC0010715
- Resource Type:
- Accepted Manuscript
- Journal Name:
- The ISME Journal
- Additional Journal Information:
- Journal Volume: 11; Journal Issue: 8; Journal ID: ISSN 1751-7362
- Publisher:
- Nature Publishing Group
- Country of Publication:
- United States
- Language:
- English
- Subject:
- 54 ENVIRONMENTAL SCIENCES; climate-change ecology
Citation Formats
Cheng, Lei, Zhang, Naifang, Yuan, Mengting, Xiao, Jing, Qin, Yujia, Deng, Ye, Tu, Qichao, Xue, Kai, Van Nostrand, Joy D., Wu, Liyou, He, Zhili, Zhou, Xuhui, Leigh, Mary Beth, Konstantinidis, Konstantinos T., Schuur, Edward AG, Luo, Yiqi, Tiedje, James M., and Zhou, Jizhong. Warming enhances old organic carbon decomposition through altering functional microbial communities. United States: N. p., 2017.
Web. doi:10.1038/ismej.2017.48.
Cheng, Lei, Zhang, Naifang, Yuan, Mengting, Xiao, Jing, Qin, Yujia, Deng, Ye, Tu, Qichao, Xue, Kai, Van Nostrand, Joy D., Wu, Liyou, He, Zhili, Zhou, Xuhui, Leigh, Mary Beth, Konstantinidis, Konstantinos T., Schuur, Edward AG, Luo, Yiqi, Tiedje, James M., & Zhou, Jizhong. Warming enhances old organic carbon decomposition through altering functional microbial communities. United States. https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2017.48
Cheng, Lei, Zhang, Naifang, Yuan, Mengting, Xiao, Jing, Qin, Yujia, Deng, Ye, Tu, Qichao, Xue, Kai, Van Nostrand, Joy D., Wu, Liyou, He, Zhili, Zhou, Xuhui, Leigh, Mary Beth, Konstantinidis, Konstantinos T., Schuur, Edward AG, Luo, Yiqi, Tiedje, James M., and Zhou, Jizhong. Fri .
"Warming enhances old organic carbon decomposition through altering functional microbial communities". United States. https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2017.48. https://www.osti.gov/servlets/purl/1408455.
@article{osti_1408455,
title = {Warming enhances old organic carbon decomposition through altering functional microbial communities},
author = {Cheng, Lei and Zhang, Naifang and Yuan, Mengting and Xiao, Jing and Qin, Yujia and Deng, Ye and Tu, Qichao and Xue, Kai and Van Nostrand, Joy D. and Wu, Liyou and He, Zhili and Zhou, Xuhui and Leigh, Mary Beth and Konstantinidis, Konstantinos T. and Schuur, Edward AG and Luo, Yiqi and Tiedje, James M. and Zhou, Jizhong},
abstractNote = {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.},
doi = {10.1038/ismej.2017.48},
journal = {The ISME Journal},
number = 8,
volume = 11,
place = {United States},
year = {Fri Apr 21 00:00:00 EDT 2017},
month = {Fri Apr 21 00:00:00 EDT 2017}
}
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