Waring Bonnie, Gee Anna, Liang Guopeng, Adkins Savannah
Grantham Institute on Climate Change and the Environment and the Georgina Mace Centre for the Living Planet, Imperial College London, London SW7 2BU, UK.
Department of Forest Resources, University of Minnesota, St. Paul, 55108 MN, USA.
iScience. 2022 Jun 3;25(7):104523. doi: 10.1016/j.isci.2022.104523. eCollection 2022 Jul 15.
Soil microbes play a central role in ecosystem element cycling. Yet a central question in microbial ecology remains unanswered: to what extent does the taxonomic composition of soil microbial communities mediate biogeochemical process rates? In this quantitative review, we explore the mechanisms that lead to variation in the strength of microbial community structure-function relationships over space and time. To evaluate these mechanisms, we conduct a meta-analysis of studies that have monitored the decomposition of sterilized plant litter inoculated with different microbial assemblages. We find that the influence of microbial community composition on litter decay is pervasive and strong, rivalling in magnitude the influence of litter chemistry on decomposition. However, no single environmental or experimental attribute was correlated with variation in the inoculum effect. These results emphasize the need to better understand ecological dynamics within microbial communities, particularly emergent features such as cross-feeding networks, to improve predictions of soil biogeochemical function.
土壤微生物在生态系统元素循环中起着核心作用。然而，微生物生态学中的一个核心问题仍未得到解答：土壤微生物群落的分类组成在多大程度上介导了生物地球化学过程速率？在这项定量综述中，我们探讨了导致微生物群落结构 - 功能关系强度在空间和时间上变化的机制。为了评估这些机制，我们对监测接种不同微生物组合的灭菌植物凋落物分解情况的研究进行了荟萃分析。我们发现微生物群落组成对凋落物分解的影响普遍且强烈，其影响程度与凋落物化学性质对分解的影响相当。然而，没有单一的环境或实验属性与接种效应的变化相关。这些结果强调了更好地理解微生物群落内部生态动态的必要性，特别是诸如交叉喂养网络等涌现特征，以改进对土壤生物地球化学功能的预测。
