Abstract
As climate cooling is increasingly regarded as important natural variability of long-term global warming trends, there is a resurging interest in understanding its impact on biodiversity and ecosystem functioning. Here, we report a soil transplant experiment from lower to higher elevations in a Tibetan alpine grassland to simulate the impact of cooling on ecosystem community structure and function. Three years of cooling resulted in reduced plant productivity and microbial functional potential (for example, carbon respiration and nutrient cycling). Microbial genetic markers associated with chemically recalcitrant carbon decomposition remained unchanged despite a decrease in genes associated with chemically labile carbon decomposition. As a consequence, cooling-associated changes correlated with a decrease in soil organic carbon (SOC). Extrapolation of these results suggests that for every 1 °C decrease in annual average air temperature, 0.1 Pg (0.3%) of SOC would be lost from the Tibetan plateau. These results demonstrate that microbial feedbacks to cooling have the potential to differentially impact chemically labile and recalcitrant carbon turnover, which could lead to strong, adverse consequences on soil C storage. Our findings are alarming, considering the frequency of short-term cooling and its scale to disrupt ecosystems and biogeochemical cycling.
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Acknowledgements
We thank Haibei Research Station staff for sampling, Hao Yu for GeoChip assistance. This research was supported by grants to Yunfeng Yang from the National Key Basic Research Program of China (2013CB956601), the Strategic Priority Research Program of the Chinese Academy of Sciences (XDB15010102), and National Science Foundation of China (41471202), to Shiping Wang from the National Basic Research Program (2013CB956000) and National Science Foundation of China (41230750), and to Jizhong Zhou from the National Science Foundation of China (41430856), and the United States Department of Energy, Biological Systems Research on the Role of Microbial Communities in Carbon Cycling Program (DE-SC0010715).
Author contributions
This study was conceived and led by SW, JZ and YY; YH, QL, XL and YY carried out GeoChip experiments and environmental measurements; LW and HY performed the analytical work; LW, YY and JZ wrote the manuscript with the help from SW, ZH, JVN, LH and JG.
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Wu, L., Yang, Y., Wang, S. et al. Alpine soil carbon is vulnerable to rapid microbial decomposition under climate cooling. ISME J 11, 2102–2111 (2017). https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2017.75
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/ismej.2017.75
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