Soil microbial communities drive the resistance of ecosystem multifunctionality to global change in drylands across the globe

Abstract

The relationship between soil microbial communities and the resistance of multiple ecosystem functions linked to C, N and P cycling (multifunctionality resistance) to global change has never been assessed globally in natural ecosystems. We collected soils from 59 dryland ecosystems worldwide to investigate the importance of microbial communities as predictor of multifunctionality resistance to climate change and nitrogen fertilisation. Multifunctionality had a lower resistance to wetting-drying cycles than to warming or N deposition. Multifunctionality resistance was regulated by changes in microbial composition (relative abundance of phylotypes) but not by richness, total abundance of fungi and bacteria or the fungal: bacterial ratio. Our results suggest that positive effects of particular microbial taxa on multifunctionality resistance could potentially be controlled by altering soil pH. Together, our work demonstrates strong links between microbial community composition and multifunctionality resistance in dryland soils from six continents, and provides insights into the importance of microbial community composition for buffering effects of global change in drylands worldwide.

Temporal dynamics of soil bacterial communities and multifunctionality are more sensitive to introduced plants than to microbial additions in a multicontaminated soil

“…Land degradation is a global problem that is leads to substantial changes in soil biodiversity and ecosystem functions and services (Caravaca, Lozano, Rodriguez‐Caballero, & Roldan, ; Delgado‐Baquerizo et al, ). Revealing the temporal responses of particular bacterial groups to soil perturbations and their contributions to ecosystem multifunctionality is pivotal to understand the maintenance of microbial diversity and microbe‐driven ecosystem processes (Delgado‐Baquerizo et al, ). In this study, we found that native bacterial communities exhibited stronger resilience to the introduced microbial consortium than to the legume plants growing in a multicontaminated agricultural soil.…”

“…Aboveground–belowground linkages have important implications for restoration ecology in that they play vital roles in driving ecosystem structure and functioning, including the cycling of carbon and nutrients (Kardol & Wardle, ). Microbial ecosystems can exhibit remarkable resistance and resilience in response to various environmental alterations, such as global climate change (Delgado‐Baquerizo et al, ; Szekely & Langenheder, ), soil contamination (Jiao, Chen, et al, ; Jiao, Liu, et al, ), and pH fluctuation (Feng et al, ). In our experiment, we found that soil microcosms were influenced by introducing the contaminant‐degrading microbial consortium in the early phase, but they quickly recovered their compositional β ‐diversity.…”

“…Soil microorganisms represent one of the largest biodiversity reservoirs in terrestrial ecosystems. Microorganisms play key roles in maintaining multiple ecosystem functions and services simultaneously (hereafter ‘multifunctionality’), such as primary production, litter decomposition, nutrient cycling, and climate regulation (Delgado‐Baquerizo et al, ; Delgado‐Baquerizo et al, ; Haroon et al, ; Hicks Pries, Castanha, Porras, & Torn, ). In addition, microbial communities respond rapidly to environmental disturbances, and their sensitive responses can be monitored to assess the potential soil stability and degradation (Jiao et al, ).…”

Australian dryland soils are acidic and nutrient‐depleted, and have unique microbial communities compared with other drylands

“…For example, soil pH values from our soils were also negatively correlated with the relative abundance of Basidiomycota (Supporting Information Table S4), a group of fungi found typically in acidic forested soils, but positively correlated with Actibobacteria and Gemmatimonadetes, and the fungal phyla Glomeromycota and Chytridiomycota (Supporting Information Table S4). Proteobacteria, particularly γ-Proteobacteria, have been shown to be important drivers of soil functioning in both field and microcosm studies from Australian soils (Delgado-Baquerizo et al, 2017). …”

“…Data availability and references to the original protocols for each dataset are available in Supporting Information Table S2. For example, in the particular case of soil microbial communities, we gathered information for 101 plots including the 79 sites in Maestre et al (2015) and the 22 sites in Delgado-Baquerizo et al (2017).…”