Resistance–recovery trade‐off of soil microbial communities under altered rain regimes: An experimental test across European agroecosystems

Abstract

With the increased occurrence of climate extremes, there is an urgent need to better understand how management strategies affect the capacity of the soil microbial community to maintain its ecosystem functions (e.g. nutrient cycling). To address this issue, intact monoliths were extracted from conventional and ecological managed grasslands in three countries across Europe and exposed under common air condition (temperature and moisture) to one of three altered rain regimes (dry, wet and intermittent wet/dry) as compared to a normal regime. Subsequently, we compared the resistance and recovery of the soil microbial biomass, potential enzyme activities and community composition. The microbial community composition differed with soil management and rain regimes. Soil microbial biomass increased from the wetter to the dryer rain regime, paralleling an increase of available carbon and nutrients, suggesting low sensitivity to soil moisture reduction but nutritional limitations of soil microbes. Conversely, enzyme activities decreased with all altered rain regimes. Resistance and recovery (considering absolute distance between normal and altered rain regime) of the microbial communities depended on soil management. Conventional‐intensive management showed higher resistance of two fundamental properties for nutrient cycling (i.e. bacterial biomass and extracellular enzyme activities) yet associated with more important changes in microbial community composition. This suggests an internal community reorganization promoting biomass and activity resistance. Conversely, under ecological management bacterial biomass and enzyme activities showed better recovery capacity, whereas no or very low recovery of these properties was observed under conventional management. These management effects were consistent across the three altered rain regimes investigated, indicating common factors controlling microbial communities’ response to different climate‐related stresses. Synthesis and applications. Our study provides experimental evidence for an important trade‐off for agroecosystem management between (a) stabilizing nutrient cycling potential during an altered rain regime period at the expense of very low recovery capacity and potential long‐term effect (conventional sites) and (b) promoting the capacity of the microbial community to recover its functional potential after the end of the stress (ecological sites). Thus, management based on ecologically sound principles may be the best option to sustain long‐term soil functioning under climate change.

Trait-trait relationships and tradeoffs vary with genome size in prokaryotes

“…This inference however contradicts the often observed and above outlined tradeoff between resistance and resilience in microbial communities (e.g. Ferenci, 2016; Garcia et al ., 2020; Piton et al ., 2021). A resistance-resilience tradeoff would instead imply a negative correlation between resistance associated traits, such as genome size or transcription factors versus resilience associated traits, such as rRNA gene copy numbers or growth rates.…”

“…Indeed, the above outlined tradeoff between functional resistance and resilience has to our knowledge mainly been observed in soil environments (e.g. Garcia et al ., 2020; Piton et al ., 2021). This is in agreement with the negative correlation between several resistance and resilience related traits particularly among larger genomes.…”

“…Such tradeoffs between resistance and resilience have been described not only at the species but also at the community level (e.g. de Vries and Shade, 2013; Garcia et al, 2020; Piton et al, 2021).…”

Relative and Quantitative Rhizosphere Microbiome Profiling Results in Distinct Abundance Patterns

“…More specifically, we wanted to determine whether relative and quantitative abundances approaches would result in a similar pattern and which approach is more closely linked to the functional processes in the rhizosphere. One of the first priorities in managing the agroecosystem is to optimize important ecosystem functions such as carbon and nitrogen cycling ( Oliver et al, 2015 ; Piton et al, 2021 ). Therefore, in this study soil respiration rate (CO 2 production) was assessed as a measure of the rhizosphere functional response.…”

Resistance and resilience of soil prokaryotic communities in response to prolonged drought in a tropical forest

“…Still, other studies indicate low resilience in for instance a grassland soil (Sheik et al, 2011), or dependence on prior drought exposure history which positively affected recovery in heathland soils (Barnard et al, 2013). Therefore, resilience may vary from one system to the other, and may depend on acclimation due to prior exposure, intensity and duration of drought (Piton et al, 2020). Amazonian tropical forests with a high mean annual precipitation are subjected to unusually intensive dry seasons in the current century (Aguilos et al, 2019),…”