14 January 2021

Soil microbial legacies differ following drying-rewetting and freezing-thawing cycles

Climate changes, Soil Microbiology

Does drying-rewetting cycles have stronger effects on soil microbial communities and CO2 production than freezing-thawing cycles?

New article from Section of Microbiology in ISME

Annelein Meisner ● Basten L. Snoek ● Joseph Nesme ● Elizabeth Dent ● Samuel Jacquiod ● Aimée T. Classen ● Anders Priemé.

The ISME Journal
READ THE FULL ARTICLE AND SEE AUTHOR AFFILIATION AT: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41396-020-00844-3

Co-response networks of the 16S OTUs at cDNA level and correlation between relative abundance and CO2 emissions.
Co-response networks of the 16S OTUs at cDNA level and correlation between relative abundance and CO2 emissions.

Climate change alters frequencies and intensities of soil drying-rewetting and freezing-thawing cycles. These fluctuations affect soil water availability, a crucial driver of soil microbial activity. While these fluctuations are leaving imprints on soil microbiome structures, the question remains if the legacy of one type of weather fluctuation (e.g., drying-rewetting) affects the community response to the other (e.g., freezing-thawing).

As both phenomenons give similar water availability fluctuations, we hypothesized that freezing-thawing and drying-rewetting cycles have similar effects on the soil microbiome.

For more details see: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41396-020-00844-3