CSIRO Plant Industry, PO Box 1600, Canberra, 2601, Australia.
Ecol Lett. 2013 May;16 Suppl 1:128-39. doi: 10.1111/ele.12109.
The soil environment is essential to many ecosystem services which are primarily mediated by microbial communities. Soil physical and chemical conditions are altered on local and global scales by anthropogenic activity and which threatens the provision of many soil services. Despite the importance of soil biota for ecosystem function, we have limited ability to predict and manage soil microbial community responses to change. To better understand causal relationships between microbial community structure and ecological function, we argue for a systems approach to prediction and management of microbial response to environmental change. This necessitates moving beyond concepts of resilience, resistance and redundancy that assume single optimum stable states, to ones that better reflect the dynamic and interactive nature of microbial systems. We consider the response of three soil groups (ammonia oxidisers, denitrifiers, symbionts) to anthropogenic perturbation to motivate our discussion. We also present a network re-analysis of a saltmarsh microbial community which illustrates how such approaches can reveal ecologically important connections between functional groups. More generally, we suggest the need for integrative studies which consider how environmental variables moderate interactions between functional groups, how this moderation affects biogeochemical processes and how these feedbacks ultimately drive ecosystem services provided by soil biota.
土壤环境对许多生态系统服务至关重要，而这些服务主要是由微生物群落介导的。土壤的物理和化学条件在当地和全球范围内因人为活动而发生变化，这威胁到许多土壤服务的提供。尽管土壤生物群对生态系统功能很重要，但我们预测和管理土壤微生物群落对变化的反应的能力有限。为了更好地理解微生物群落结构与生态功能之间的因果关系，我们主张采用系统方法来预测和管理微生物对环境变化的反应。这需要超越假设单一最佳稳定状态的弹性、抵抗力和冗余性概念，转向更好地反映微生物系统的动态和相互作用性质的概念。我们考虑了三个土壤群体（氨氧化菌、反硝化菌、共生体）对人为干扰的反应，以激发我们的讨论。我们还对盐沼微生物群落进行了网络重新分析，说明了这些方法如何揭示功能组之间生态上重要的联系。更广泛地说，我们建议需要进行综合研究，考虑环境变量如何调节功能组之间的相互作用，这种调节如何影响生物地球化学过程，以及这些反馈最终如何驱动土壤生物群提供的生态系统服务。
