RT Journal Article
SR Electronic
T1 Climate change will lead to pronounced shifts in the diversity of soil microbial communities
JF bioRxiv
FD Cold Spring Harbor Laboratory
SP 180174
DO 10.1101/180174
A1 Joshua Ladau
A1 Yu Shi
A1 Xin Jing
A1 Jin-Sheng He
A1 Litong Chen
A1 Xiangui Lin
A1 Noah Fierer
A1 Jack A Gilbert
A1 Katherine S Pollard
A1 Haiyan Chu
YR 2017
UL http://biorxiv.org/content/early/2017/09/01/180174.abstract
AB 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 (~70%) 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 demonstrate the widespread influence that climate change will have on belowground diversity and highlight the importance of considering bacterial communities when assessing climate impacts on terrestrial ecosystems.