Ladau Joshua, Shi Yu, Jing Xin, He Jin-Sheng, Chen Litong, Lin Xiangui, Fierer Noah, Gilbert Jack A, Pollard Katherine S, Chu Haiyan
State Key Laboratory of Soil and Sustainable Agriculture, Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Nanjing, China.
Gladstone Institutes, San Francisco, California, USA.
mSystems. 2018 Oct 23;3(5). doi: 10.1128/mSystems.00167-18. eCollection 2018 Sep-Oct.
Soil bacteria are key to ecosystem function and maintenance of soil fertility. Leveraging associations of current geographic distributions of bacteria with historic climate, we predict that soil bacterial diversity will increase across the majority (∼75%) of the Tibetan Plateau and northern North America if bacterial communities equilibrate with existing climatic conditions. This prediction is possible because the current distributions of soil bacteria have stronger correlations with climate from ∼50 years ago than with current climate. This lag is likely associated with the time it takes for soil properties to adjust to changes in climate. The predicted changes are location specific and differ across bacterial taxa, including some bacteria that are predicted to have reductions in their distributions. These findings illuminate the widespread potential of climate change to influence belowground diversity and the importance of considering bacterial communities when assessing climate impacts on terrestrial ecosystems. There have been many studies highlighting how plant and animal communities lag behind climate change, causing extinction and diversity debts that will slowly be paid as communities equilibrate. By virtue of their short generation times and dispersal abilities, soil bacteria might be expected to respond to climate change quickly and to be effectively in equilibrium with current climatic conditions. We found strong evidence to the contrary in Tibet and North America. These findings could significantly improve understanding of climate impacts on soil microbial communities.
土壤细菌是生态系统功能和土壤肥力维持的关键。利用当前细菌地理分布与历史气候的关联，我们预测，如果细菌群落与现有气候条件达到平衡，青藏高原大部分地区（约75%）和北美北部的土壤细菌多样性将会增加。这一预测之所以可行，是因为当前土壤细菌的分布与约50年前的气候相关性比与当前气候的相关性更强。这种滞后可能与土壤性质适应气候变化所需的时间有关。预测的变化具有地点特异性，且不同细菌类群存在差异，包括一些预计分布会减少的细菌。这些发现揭示了气候变化影响地下多样性的广泛潜力，以及在评估气候对陆地生态系统的影响时考虑细菌群落的重要性。已有许多研究强调动植物群落如何滞后于气候变化，导致灭绝和多样性债务，随着群落达到平衡，这些债务将慢慢得到偿还。鉴于土壤细菌的世代时间短和扩散能力，人们可能预计它们会迅速响应气候变化并与当前气候条件有效达到平衡。但我们在西藏和北美发现了相反的有力证据。这些发现可显著增进对气候对土壤微生物群落影响的理解。
