Metabolic tradeoffs and heterogeneity in microbial responses to temperature determine the fate of litter carbon in simulations of a warmer world

Pold, Grace; Sistla, Seeta A.; DeAngelis, Kristen M.

doi:10.5194/bg-16-4875-2019

Title: Metabolic tradeoffs and heterogeneity in microbial responses to temperature determine the fate of litter carbon in simulations of a warmer world

Journal Article · 20 December 2019 · Biogeosciences (Online)

DOI: https://doi.org/10.5194/bg-16-4875-2019 · OSTI ID:1580139

^[1]; Sistla, Seeta A. ^[2]; DeAngelis, Kristen M. ^[3]

Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA (United States). Graduate Program in Organismic and Evolutionary Biology; California Polytechnic State Univ. (CalPoly), San Luis Obispo, CA (United States). Natural Resources Management and Environmental Sciences
California Polytechnic State Univ. (CalPoly), San Luis Obispo, CA (United States). Natural Resources Management and Environmental Sciences
Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA (United States). Dept. of Microbiology

Climate change has the potential to destabilize the Earth's massive terrestrial carbon (C) stocks, but the degree to which models project this destabilization to occur depends on the kinds and complexities of microbial processes they simulate. Of particular note is carbon use efficiency (CUE), which determines the fraction of C processed by microbes that is anabolized into microbial biomass rather than lost to the atmosphere and soil as carbon dioxide and extracellular products. The temperature sensitivity of CUE is often modeled as an intrinsically fixed (homogeneous) property of the community, which contrasts with empirical data and has unknown impacts on projected changes to the soil C cycle under global warming. We used the Decomposition Model of Enzymatic Traits (DEMENT) – which simulates taxon-level litter decomposition dynamics – to explore the effects of introducing organism-level heterogeneity into the CUE response to temperature for decomposition of leaf litter under 5 °C of warming. We found that allowing the CUE temperature response to differ between taxa facilitated increased loss of litter C, unless fungal taxa were specifically restricted to decreasing CUE with temperature. Litter C loss was exacerbated by variable and elevated CUE at higher temperature, which effectively lowered costs for extracellular enzyme production. Together these results implicate a role for diversity of taxon-level CUE responses in driving the fate of litter C in a warmer world within DEMENT, which should be explored within the framework of additional model structures and validated with empirical studies.

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Research Organization:: Univ. of Massachusetts, Amherst, MA (United States)

Sponsoring Organization:: USDOE Office of Science (SC)

Grant/Contract Number:: SC0016590

OSTI ID:: 1580139

Alternate ID(s):: OSTI ID: 1803061

Journal Information:: Biogeosciences (Online), Vol. 16, Issue 24; ISSN 1726-4189

Publisher:: Copernicus Publications, EGUCopyright Statement

Country of Publication:: United States

Language:: English

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Cited by: 3 works

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