Fast response of fungal and prokaryotic communities to climate change manipulation in two contrasting tundra soils

Abstract

Background Climate models predict substantial changes in temperature and precipitation patterns across Arctic regions, including increased winter precipitation as snow in the near future. Soil microorganisms are considered key players in organic matter decomposition and regulation of biogeochemical cycles. However, current knowledge regarding their response to future climate changes is limited. Here, we explore the short-term effect of increased snow cover on soil fungal, bacterial and archaeal communities in two tundra sites with contrasting water regimes in Greenland. In order to assess seasonal variation of microbial communities, we collected soil samples four times during the plant-growing season. Results The analysis revealed that soil microbial communities from two tundra sites differed from each other due to contrasting soil chemical properties. Fungal communities showed higher richness at the dry site whereas richness of prokaryotes was higher at the wet tundra site. We demonstrated that fungal and bacterial communities at both sites were significantly affected by short-term increased snow cover manipulation. Our results showed that fungal community composition was more affected by deeper snow cover compared to prokaryotes. The fungal communities showed changes in both taxonomic and ecological groups in response to climate manipulation. However, the changes were not pronounced at all sampling times which points to the need of multiple sampling in ecosystems where environmental factors show seasonal variation. Further, we showed that effects of increased snow cover were manifested after snow had melted. Conclusions We demonstrated rapid response of soil fungal and bacterial communities to short-term climate manipulation simulating increased winter precipitation at two tundra sites. In particular, we provide evidence that fungal community composition was more affected by increased snow cover compared to prokaryotes indicating fast adaptability to changing environmental conditions. Since fungi are considered the main decomposers of complex organic matter in terrestrial ecosystems, the stronger response of fungal communities may have implications for organic matter turnover in tundra soils under future climate.

Impact of long-term fertilizer and summer warming treatments on bulk soil and birch rhizosphere microbial communities in mesic arctic tundra

“…Bacterial communities in both the bulk soil and birch rhizosphere samples from across our experiment appeared to be dominated by Actinobacteria and Proteobacteria, respectively, and similar patterns have been reported from other low Arctic as well as high Arctic and alpine tundra sites (Y. Shi et al 2015;Kumar et al 2017;Voříšková, Elberling, and Priemé 2019). Fertilization, particularly with N + P, seemed to decrease the average relative abundance of Planctomycetes, a taxon associated with lichens (Ivanova et al 2016), and thus is consistent with the potential for landscape change.…”

Long-term fungus-plant co-variation from multi-site sedimentary ancient DNA metabarcoding in Siberia

“…Mortierella and Penicillium, two of the most common taxa in our dataset, are reported as some of the main soil fungi in arctic tundra soils (Kurek et al, 2007;Zhang et al, 2016) due to their cold tolerance. Mortierella was also found as an associate of Vaccinium uliginosum, Betula nana, Salix glauca, Empetrum nigrum, and Cassiope tetragona (Voříšková et al, 2019), which are typical taxa in our metabarcoding study. Rhizosphere samples from Larix sibirica and Betula pendula from Krasnoyarsk, Siberia revealed Penicillium as one of the main constituents (Boyandin et al, 2012).…”

“…Protoventuria species, for example, penetrate leaves and show up as distinct spots on the plant leaf (Carris and Poole, 1993). In shrubby tundra in Greenland with Salix occurrences, Venturia species are amongst the highest abundant fungi (Voříšková et al, 2019), indicating a strong covariation between this fungus and Salix. To date, plant-parasite interplay in relation to climate change is not fully understood (Burdon and Zhan, 2020) but it is assumed that parasitic fungal species are more specific in their hosts than, for example, mycorrhizal taxa are (Põlme et al, 2018).…”

Rapid Response to Experimental Warming of a Microbial Community Inhabiting High Arctic Patterned Ground Soil

“…We advocate further research to identify whether strong inhibitory effects on decomposition processes and the subsequent immobilisation of N in microbial protein [ 9 ] might help to explain the increase in bacterial abundance in warmed soils with high C:N ratios. Further studies should also determine why snowfences, which increase wintertime soil temperatures, also have rapid (1–6 years) effects on microbial communities in vegetated Arctic soils [ 64 , 65 , 66 ].…”