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Impacts of Projected Climate Warming and Wetting on Soil Microbial Communities in Alpine Grassland Ecosystems of the Tibetan Plateau

  • Soil Microbiology
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Abstract

Climate change is projected to have impacts on precipitation and temperature regimes in drylands of high elevation regions, with especially large effects in the Qinghai-Tibetan Plateau. However, there was limited information about how the projected climate change will impact on the soil microbial community and their activity in the region. Here, we present results from a study conducted across 72 soil samples from 24 different sites along a temperature and precipitation gradient (substituted by aridity index ranging from 0.079 to 0.89) of the Plateau, to assess how changes in aridity affect the abundance, community composition, and diversity of bacteria, ammonia-oxidizers, and denitrifers (nirK/S and nosZ genes-containing communities) as well as nitrogen (N) turnover enzyme activities. We found V-shaped or inverted V-shaped relationships between the aridity index (AI) and soil microbial parameters (gene abundance, community structures, microbial diversity, and N turnover enzyme activities) with a threshold at AI = 0.27. The increasing or decreasing rates of the microbial parameters were higher in areas with AI < 0.27 (alpine steppes) than in mesic areas with 0.27 < AI < 0.89 (alpine meadow and swamp meadow). The results indicated that the projected warming and wetting have a strong impact on soil microbial communities in the alpine steppes.

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Acknowledgements

This work was financially supported by grants from the National Science Foundation of China (41230857) and the Ministry of Science and Technology of China (2013CB956300). We are grateful to Professor Fan Liu from Huazhong Agricultural University for his assistance in soil sampling and Professor PM Chalk from The University of Melbourne for his valuable comments on this manuscript.

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. State Key Laboratory of Urban and Regional Ecology, Research Center for Eco-Environmental Sciences, Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100085, China

    Jun Zeng, Ju-Pei Shen, Jun-Tao Wang, Cui-Jing Zhang, Ren Bai, Li-Mei Zhang & Ji-Zheng He

  2. College of Resources and Environment, University of the Chinese Academy of Sciences, Beijing, 100049, China

    Jun Zeng, Ju-Pei Shen, Li-Mei Zhang & Ji-Zheng He

  3. Institute of Applied Microbiology, Xinjiang Academy of Agricultural Sciences, Urumqi, 830091, China

    Jun Zeng

  4. Faculty of Veterinary and Agricultural Sciences, The University of Melbourne, Parkville, VIC, 3010, Australia

    Hang-Wei Hu & Ji-Zheng He

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  1. Jun Zeng
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Zeng, J., Shen, JP., Wang, JT. et al. Impacts of Projected Climate Warming and Wetting on Soil Microbial Communities in Alpine Grassland Ecosystems of the Tibetan Plateau. Microb Ecol 75, 1009–1023 (2018). https://doi.org/10.1007/s00248-017-1098-4

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