Soil microbes impact climate, but how are they affected by climate change?
In a surprising twist, an international research team has found that food, not temperature, is the most important factor driving microbial release of CO2
The largest terrestrial carbon sink on Earth is the planet’s soil. One of the big fears is that a warming planet will liberate significant portions of the soil’s carbon, turning it into carbon dioxide (CO2) gas, and so further accelerate the pace of planetary warming.
A key player in this story is the microbe, the predominant form of Life on Earth, and which can either turn organic carbon – fallen leaves, rotting tree stumps, dead roots and other organic matter – into soil, or release it into the atmosphere as CO2.
Now, an international team of researchers led by the University of Massachusetts Amherst has helped to untangle one of the knottiest questions involving soil microbes and climate change: what effect does a warming planet have on the microbes’ carbon cycling?
The answer is surprising: increased temperature decreases the rate at which soil microbes respire CO2 – but only in the summer. During the rest of the year, microbial activity remains largely historically consistent.
But there’s a catch to this seemingly happy story. Soil microbes are releasing less CO2 in the summer because they’re starving. And they’re starving because long-term warming is threatening the viability of deciduous trees, on whose dead leaves the microbes depend.
sampling soils
Kristen DeAngelis, professor of microbiology at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and senior author, said: “One of the major outcomes of our study is that all those autumn leaves mitigate the negative effects of global warming on soil microbes.”
For now. But fewer dead leaves means less food for the microbes and seems to be leading to a reduction in microbial biomass during the summer.
To reach these conclusions, DeAngelis and her co-authors teamed up with two remarkable, long-term studies sited at the Harvard Forest: a project begun in 1991 by co-author Jerry Melillo on soil warming in forest ecosystems, and another, begun by co-author Serita Frey in 2006, focused on soil microbes and warming.
The paper’s lead author, Luiz A Domeignoz-Horta, who completed this research while at UMass Amherst and who is now a post-doctoral fellow in the Department of Evolutionary Biology and Environmental Studies at the University of Zurich, explained: “Sampling soils that have been warmed for 13 and 28 years helped us elucidate how resilient to changes microorganisms are to shifts in temperature.”
Though much of the attention to climate change has been understandably focused on the burning of fossil fuels, it is equally important for scientists to understand the ‘carbon budget’, or the complete cycle of how carbon cycles through the air, soil and water.
DeAngelis said: “Once I woke up to climate change, I thought ‘what can I as a microbiologist do?’”
This newest research gives climate modellers a better understanding of how carbon works in the soil, which will allow us all to better plan for a warming world.
The study is published in the journal Global Change Biology.
Image: Samples were harvested at two time points in July and October 2019 at two long-term warming experiments, SWaN and PH, at the Harvard Forest long-term ecological research station, which had been established for 13 and 28 years, respectively. © Domeignoz-Horta et al., 10.1111/gcb.16544.
