title: Effects of Short-Term Warming and Altered Precipitation on Soil Microbial Communities in Alpine Grassland of the Tibetan Plateau.
abstract: Soil microbial communities are influenced by climate change drivers such as warming and altered precipitation. These changes create abiotic stresses, including desiccation and nutrient limitation, which act on microbes. However, our understanding of the responses of microbial communities to co-occurring climate change drivers is limited. We surveyed soil bacterial and fungal diversity and composition after a 1-year warming and altered precipitation manipulation in the Tibetan plateau alpine grassland. In isolation, warming and decreased precipitation treatments each had no significant effects on soil bacterial community structure; however, in combination of both treatments altered bacterial community structure (p = 0.03). The main effect of altered precipitation specifically impacted the relative abundances of Bacteroidetes and Gammaproteobacteria compared to the control, while the main effect of warming impacted the relative abundance of Betaproteobacteria. In contrast, the fungal community had no significant response to the treatments after 1-year. Using structural equation modeling (SEM), we found bacterial community composition was positively related to soil moisture. Our results indicate that short-term climate change could cause changes in soil bacterial community through taxonomic shifts. Our work provides new insights into immediate soil microbial responses to short-term stressors acting on an ecosystem that is particularly sensitive to global climate change.
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Soil and Sustainable Agriculture, Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Science Nanjing, China.
authors.forename: Kaoping
authors.initials: K
authors.lastname: Zhang
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Soil and Sustainable Agriculture, Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Science Nanjing, China.
authors.forename: Yu
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Shi
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences and Key Laboratory for Earth Surface Processes of the Ministry of Education, Peking University Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Xin
authors.initials: X
authors.lastname: Jing
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology, College of Urban and Environmental Sciences and Key Laboratory for Earth Surface Processes of the Ministry of Education, Peking UniversityBeijing, China; Key Laboratory of Adaptation and Evolution of Plateau Biota, Northwest Institute of Plateau Biology, Chinese Academy of SciencesXining, China.
authors.forename: Jin-Sheng
authors.initials: JS
authors.lastname: He
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Soil and Sustainable Agriculture, Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Science Nanjing, China.
authors.forename: Ruibo
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Sun
authors.affiliation: State Key Joint Laboratory of Environment Simulation and Pollution Control, School of Environment, Tsinghua University Beijing, China.
authors.forename: Yunfeng
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Yang
authors.affiliation: Department of Microbiology and Molecular Genetics, Michigan State University East Lansing, MI, USA.
authors.forename: Ashley
authors.initials: A
authors.lastname: Shade
authors.affiliation: State Key Laboratory of Soil and Sustainable Agriculture, Institute of Soil Science, Chinese Academy of Science Nanjing, China.
authors.forename: Haiyan
authors.initials: H
authors.lastname: Chu
keywords: alpine grassland; climate change; pyrosequencing; soil microbial community structure; soil moisture