title: Microbial legacies alter decomposition in response to simulated global change.
abstract: Terrestrial ecosystem models assume that microbial communities respond instantaneously, or are immediately resilient, to environmental change. Here we tested this assumption by quantifying the resilience of a leaf litter community to changes in precipitation or nitrogen availability. By manipulating composition within a global change experiment, we decoupled the legacies of abiotic parameters versus that of the microbial community itself. After one rainy season, more variation in fungal composition could be explained by the original microbial inoculum than the litterbag environment (18% versus 5.5% of total variation). This compositional legacy persisted for 3 years, when 6% of the variability in fungal composition was still explained by the microbial origin. In contrast, bacterial composition was generally more resilient than fungal composition. Microbial functioning (measured as decomposition rate) was not immediately resilient to the global change manipulations; decomposition depended on both the contemporary environment and rainfall the year prior. Finally, using metagenomic sequencing, we showed that changes in precipitation, but not nitrogen availability, altered the potential for bacterial carbohydrate degradation, suggesting why the functional consequences of the two experiments may have differed. Predictions of how terrestrial ecosystem processes respond to environmental change may thus be improved by considering the legacies of microbial communities.
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Jennifer Bh
authors.initials: JB
authors.lastname: Martiny
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA.|Department of Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Adam C
authors.initials: AC
authors.lastname: Martiny
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Claudia
authors.initials: C
authors.lastname: Weihe
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Ying
authors.initials: Y
authors.lastname: Lu
authors.affiliation: Department of Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA.|Department of Biology, California State University, Long Beach, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Renaud
authors.initials: R
authors.lastname: Berlemont
authors.affiliation: Ecology Department, Earth and Environmental Sciences, Lawrence Berkeley National Laboratory, Berkeley, CA, USA.|Department of Environmental Science, Policy and Management, University of California, Berkeley, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Eoin L
authors.initials: EL
authors.lastname: Brodie
authors.affiliation: Department of Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Michael L
authors.initials: ML
authors.lastname: Goulden
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Kathleen K
authors.initials: KK
authors.lastname: Treseder
authors.affiliation: Department of Ecology and Evolutionary Biology, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA.|Department of Earth System Science, University of California, Irvine, CA, USA.
authors.forename: Steven D
authors.initials: SD
authors.lastname: Allison
mesh_terms: D001419:Bacteria / Q000145:classification* / Q000235:genetics / Q000254:growth & development; D050260:Carbohydrate Metabolism; D057231:Climate Change; D017753:Ecosystem; D005658:Fungi / Q000145:classification* / Q000235:genetics / Q000254:growth & development; D056186:Metagenomics; D059013:Microbial Consortia; D009584:Nitrogen / Q000378:metabolism; D018515:Plant Leaves / Q000382:microbiology; D011891:Rain; D012621:Seasons; D017422:Sequence Analysis, DNA; D013997:Time Factors
chemical_list: D009584:Nitrogen