Resistance, resilience, and redundancy in microbial communities

Abstract

Although it is generally accepted that plant community composition is key for predicting rates of ecosystem processes in the face of global change, microbial community composition is often ignored in ecosystem modeling. To address this issue, we review recent experiments and assess whether microbial community composition is resistant, resilient, or functionally redundant in response to four different disturbances. We find that the composition of most microbial groups is sensitive and not immediately resilient to disturbance, regardless of taxonomic breadth of the group or the type of disturbance. Other studies demonstrate that changes in composition are often associated with changes in ecosystem process rates. Thus, changes in microbial communities due to disturbance may directly affect ecosystem processes. Based on these relationships, we propose a simple framework to incorporate microbial community composition into ecosystem process models. We conclude that this effort would benefit from more empirical data on the links among microbial phylogeny, physiological traits, and disturbance responses. These relationships will determine how readily microbial community composition can be used to predict the responses of ecosystem processes to global change.functional redundancy ͉ microbial diversity ͉ modeling

Dormancy contributes to the maintenance of microbial diversity

“…Dormancy has the potential to explain numerous ecological patterns observed in microbial systems over the past decade, including repeated seasonal succession (6), the rare microbial biosphere (22), and the apparent resilience to disturbance of microbially mediated processes (48). In addition, the dormancydriven decoupling of active and total composition observed in our study raises the question of whether we must consider the use of rRNA-based approaches to link microbial community structure and function.…”

Microbial community structure mediates response of soil C decomposition to litter addition and warming

“…Although other groups (particularly gram-negative bacteria) may also have contributed to differences in the direction of priming between litter treatments, only gram-positive bacteria showed a consistent response to temperature. A meta-analysis by Allison and Martiny (2008) found that the majority (80%) of soil-warming experiments showed changes in microbial community structure, and many studies (although not all) show increases in gram-positive bacteria (Zogg et al, 1997;Rinnan et al, 2007;Frey et al, 2008;Feng and Simpson, 2009;Schindlbacher et al, 2011;Ziegler et al, 2013;Wei et al, 2014;Xiong et al, 2014); a microbial group associated with soil-C decomposition in this study and often associated with mineral C decomposition and low substrate availability (Fierer et al, 2003;Kramer and Gleixner, 2008). The results from our study suggest that this microbial group may potentially mediate the response of soil-C mineralization and priming in a warming climate.…”

“…However, the role microbial community structure and function plays in soil and litter turnover, and its response to elevated temperatures and N availability, is less understood. The concept of a functional redundancy of microbial communities, where under the right environmental circumstances the same functions and processes can be performed regardless of the microbial community present in the soil, has recently been challenged (Allison and Martiny, 2008;Strickland et al, 2009), and changes to microbial community structure have been linked to a wide range of ecosystem processes (Wardle et al, 2004;Balser and Firestone, 2005;Lau and Lennon, 2012;. For example, distinct microbial communities can impact the resulting chemistry and mass loss of litter (Wickings et al, 2012;Allison et al, 2013), particularly if the litter is of similar composition to that which is frequently experienced by the microbes (Ayres et al, 2009;Freschet et al, 2012).…”

Responses of Soil Fungi to Logging and Oil Palm Agriculture in Southeast Asian Tropical Forests

“…Soil disturbance across a wide range of systems can have rapid and persistent impacts on soil microbial communities [106], and our study is the first to evaluate soil fungal responses to tropical logging and oil palm agriculture using molecular techniques. Some of the differences in the soil physicochemical properties across land-use types may explain the variation in fungal composition we observed, although further experimentation will be necessary to identify causal links.…”