Response of microbial community and net nitrogen turnover to modify climate change in Alpine meadow (2020.0)
Wang N., Wang C., Dannenmann M., Butterbach-Bahl K., Huang J.
Applied Soil Ecology, 152 (), 103553
doi:10.1016/j.apsoil.2020.103553
Abstract
In order to investigate the effect of climate change on the functional role of microbial community, we studied links between microbial community structure and the net ammonification and nitrification rates in a space for time climate change experiment. Abundance of bacteria and fungi as well as the induced climate change effects varied with seasons. The highest PLFA concentrations were found in frozen soils of the climate change treatment in which organic carbon (C) and nitrogen (N) substrates accumulated. It indicated that frozen soil can be the hot moment for soil microbial community. We found that climate change significantly increased total PLFA concentrations while decrease F:B ratio in July. It suggested that climate change could increase growth of bacteria more than that of fungi, and thus changed the soil microbial community structure. On the other hand, net N turnover itself was largely negative (i.e. illustrating net immobilization and the high N retention capacity). Since the ability of net rates of N turnover to predict plant N availability is relying on the (invalid) assumption that plants poorly compete for mineral N against soil microbes, this might be related to the strong plant-soil-microbe carbon-nitrogen interactions in the investigated soil, and unfortunately climate change would enhance the interaction. Therefore, net N mineralization has its limitation to deeply study the microbial N turnover in N biogeochemistry cycles.
