Dataset Information

Vegetation type, not the legacy of warming, modifies the response of microbial functional genes and greenhouse gas fluxes to drought in Oro-Arctic and alpine regions.

ABSTRACT: Climate warming and summer droughts alter soil microbial activity, affecting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in Arctic and alpine regions. However, the long-term effects of warming, and implications for future microbial resilience, are poorly understood. Using one alpine and three Arctic soils subjected to in situ long-term experimental warming, we simulated drought in laboratory incubations to test how microbial functional-gene abundance affects fluxes in three GHGs: carbon dioxide, methane, and nitrous oxide. We found that responses of functional gene abundances to drought and warming are strongly associated with vegetation type and soil carbon. Our sites ranged from a wet, forb dominated, soil carbon-rich systems to a drier, soil carbon-poor alpine site. Resilience of functional gene abundances, and in turn methane and carbon dioxide fluxes, was lower in the wetter, carbon-rich systems. However, we did not detect an effect of drought or warming on nitrous oxide fluxes. All gene-GHG relationships were modified by vegetation type, with stronger effects being observed in wetter, forb-rich soils. These results suggest that impacts of warming and drought on GHG emissions are linked to a complex set of microbial gene abundances and may be habitat-specific.

SUBMITTER: Fry EL

PROVIDER: S-EPMC10673709 | biostudies-literature | 2023 Nov

REPOSITORIES: biostudies-literature

ACCESS DATA

Publications

Vegetation type, not the legacy of warming, modifies the response of microbial functional genes and greenhouse gas fluxes to drought in Oro-Arctic and alpine regions.

Fry Ellen L EL Ashworth Deborah D Allen Kimberley A J KAJ Chardon Nathalie Isabelle NI Rixen Christian C Björkman Mats P MP Björk Robert G RG Stålhandske Thomas T Molau Mathias M Locke-King Brady B Cantillon Isabelle I McDonald Catriona C Liu Hongwei H De Vries Franciska T FT Ostle Nick J NJ Singh Brajesh K BK Bardgett Richard D RD

FEMS microbiology ecology 20231101 12

Climate warming and summer droughts alter soil microbial activity, affecting greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions in Arctic and alpine regions. However, the long-term effects of warming, and implications for future microbial resilience, are poorly understood. Using one alpine and three Arctic soils subjected to in situ long-term experimental warming, we simulated drought in laboratory incubations to test how microbial functional-gene abundance affects fluxes in three GHGs: carbon dioxide, methane, and ...[more]

PMID: 37951295

Similar Datasets

Project description:The distribution of 'cold-adapted' plant species is expected to undergo severe range loss in the near future. Species distribution models predicting species' future distribution often do not integrate species ability to respond to environmental factors through genetic traits or phenotypic plasticity. This especially applies to arctic-alpine species whose present-day range is strongly fragmented because of the cyclic vicissitudes they experienced during the Ice Age. We cultivated plants from four European populations of the arctic-alpine species Viscaria alpina from different geographic provenances. Two of the populations were from northern high-latitude regions in Scandinavia; the remaining two populations were from southern mid-latitude mountains. In both areas, one population was from a colder site and the other from a warmer site. We cultivated the plants in controlled thermal conditions with two treatments, one mimicking temperature conditions at the warmest site and the other adding 2 day-temperature peaks mimicking short-term heat waves. At the end of the experiment, we measured growth in length and mortality of all plants along with a set of ecophysiological variables. We also assessed phylogeographic variation in the four populations based on plastid-DNA sequences. The plants from northern provenances grew more than those from the southern provenances. The plants of all populations performed overall well, in terms of growth rate and ecophysiology, under the heat spell, with the plants of the Swedish population exhibiting the highest phenotypic plasticity. Such a pattern was associated with the highest genetic variation in the Swedish population. Mortality of the plants cultivated under warm temperatures was overall low, but mortality strongly increased in the plants exposed to the heat spell. We conclude that plants of V. alpina populations from different geographic provenances are generally able to cope with scenarios resulting from global warming, but drought hampers resilience to heat waves through increased mortality.

Dataset Information

Vegetation type, not the legacy of warming, modifies the response of microbial functional genes and greenhouse gas fluxes to drought in Oro-Arctic and alpine regions.

Publications

Vegetation type, not the legacy of warming, modifies the response of microbial functional genes and greenhouse gas fluxes to drought in Oro-Arctic and alpine regions.

Similar Datasets

OmicsDI is part of the ELIXIR infrastructure

Tweets