scholarly journals Nitrogen enrichment causes thermal acclimation of soil microbial respiration

Author(s):  
Huimin Sun ◽  
Hongyang Chen ◽  
Jintao Li ◽  
Yan Zhang ◽  
Xiang Liu ◽  
...  

The feedback between soil carbon (C) and climate has the potential to decrease in magnitude over time due to the thermal acclimation of microbial respiration, while, whose strength is highly uncertain, partly because the response of microbial respiration is regulated by multiple environmental factors simultaneously rather than by temperature alone. Using a 9-year two-way factorial experiment involving warming and multilevel nitrogen enrichment treatments from an alpine grassland, we show that microbial respiration acclimates to warming only under nitrogen enrichment and that the strength of thermal acclimation increases as nitrogen enrichment. We identified two contrasting pathways—via an enhancement of acclimation by soil acidification and a weakening of acclimation by the inhibition of soil C availability and stimulation of soil C-degrading enzymes—with a net positive effect of nitrogen enrichment on microbial thermal acclimation. Our findings emphasize the importance of considering multiple environmental factors in shaping the strength of thermal acclimation.

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Carolina Urbina Malo ◽  
Ye Tian ◽  
Chupei Shi ◽  
Shasha Zhang ◽  
Marilena Heitger ◽  
...  

<p>Despite the intensified efforts to understand the impacts of climate change on forest soil C dynamics, few studies have addressed the long term effects of warming on microbially mediated soil C and nutrient processes. In the few long-term soil warming experiments the initial stimulation of soil C cycling diminished with time, due to thermal acclimation of the microbial community or due to depletion of labile soil C as the major substrate for heterotrophic soil microbes. Thermal acclimation can arise as a consequence of prolonged warming and is defined as the direct organism response to elevated temperature across annual to decadal time-scales which manifest as a physiological change of the soil microbial community. This mechanism is clearly different from apparent thermal acclimation, where the attenuated response of soil microbial processes to warming is due to the exhaustion of the labile soil C pool.</p><p>The Achenkirch experiment, situated in the Northern Limestone Alps, Austria (47°34’ 50’’ N; 11°38’ 21’’ E; 910 m a.s.l.) is a long term (>15 yrs) soil warming experiment that has provided key insights into the effects of global warming on the forest soil C cycle. At the Achenkirch site, we have observed a sustained positive response of heterotrophic soil respiration and of soil CO<sub>2</sub> efflux to warming after nine years (2013), making it an appropriate setting for testing hypotheses about continued or decreasing warming effects at decadal scales. We collected soil from six warmed and six control plots in October 2019, from 0-10 cm and 10-20 cm depth, and incubated them at three different temperatures: ambient, +4, and +10 °C. We measured potential soil enzyme activities with fluorimetric assays, gross rates of protein depolymerization, N mineralization, and nitrification with <sup>15</sup>N isotope pool dilution approaches, and microbial growth, respiration, and C use efficiency (CUE) based on the <sup>18</sup>O incorporation in DNA and gas analysis.  Our preliminary results show that potential enzyme activities of aminopeptidase, N-acetylglucosaminidase, b-glucosidase, and acid phosphatase were stimulated by decadal soil warming by 1.7- to 3.5-fold, measured at the same i.e. ambient temperature. In contrast, the temperature sensitivity (Q10) remained unaltered between warmed and control soils for all enzyme activities (Q10=1.63-2.28), except for aminopeptidase where we observed a decrease in Q10 by 25% in warmed topsoils (0-10 cm). Aminopeptidase also had the highest temperature-sensitivity (Q10=2.39), causing a decrease of the enzymatic C: N acquisition ratio with warming. These results indicate an increasing investment in microbial N acquisition with warming. We will follow these trends based on results on gross rates of soil C and N processes, allowing to delineate decadal soil warming effects on soil microbial biogeochemistry and to understand their effect on the cross-talk between organic C and N cycling in calcareous forest soils.</p>


2022 ◽  
Author(s):  
Charlotte J. Alster ◽  
Jasmine M. Robinson ◽  
Vickery L. Arcus ◽  
Louis A. Schipper

2020 ◽  
Author(s):  
Xue Guo ◽  
Qun Gao ◽  
Mengting Yuan ◽  
Gangsheng Wang ◽  
Xishu Zhou ◽  
...  

AbstractSoil microbial respiration is an important source of uncertainty in projecting future climate and carbon (C) cycle feedbacks. Despite intensive studies for two decades, the magnitude, direction, and duration of such feedbacks are uncertain, and their underlying microbial mechanisms are still poorly understood. Here we examined the responses of soil respiration and microbial community structure to long-term experimental warming in a temperate grassland ecosystem. Our results indicated that the temperature sensitivity of soil microbial respiration (i.e., Q10) persistently decreased by 12.0±3.7% across 7 years of warming. Integrated metagenomic and functional analyses showed that microbial community adaptation played critical roles in regulating respiratory acclimation. Incorporating microbial functional gene abundance data into a microbially-enabled ecosystem model significantly improved the modeling performance of soil microbial respiration by 5–19%, compared to the traditional non-microbial model. Model parametric uncertainty was also reduced by 55–71% when gene abundances were used. In addition, our modeling analyses suggested that decreased temperature sensitivity could lead to considerably less heterotrophic respiration (11.6±7.5%), and hence less soil C loss. If such microbially mediated dampening effects occur generally across different spatial and temporal scales, the potential positive feedback of soil microbial respiration in response to climate warming may be less than previously predicted.


2020 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Xue Guo ◽  
Qun Gao ◽  
Mengting Yuan ◽  
Gangsheng Wang ◽  
Xishu Zhou ◽  
...  

Abstract Soil microbial respiration is an important source of uncertainty in projecting future climate and carbon (C) cycle feedbacks. However, its feedbacks to climate warming and underlying microbial mechanisms are still poorly understood. Here we show that the temperature sensitivity of soil microbial respiration (Q10) in a temperate grassland ecosystem persistently decreases by 12.0 ± 3.7% across 7 years of warming. Also, the shifts of microbial communities play critical roles in regulating thermal adaptation of soil respiration. Incorporating microbial functional gene abundance data into a microbially-enabled ecosystem model significantly improves the modeling performance of soil microbial respiration by 5–19%, and reduces model parametric uncertainty by 55–71%. In addition, modeling analyses show that the microbial thermal adaptation can lead to considerably less heterotrophic respiration (11.6 ± 7.5%), and hence less soil C loss. If such microbially mediated dampening effects occur generally across different spatial and temporal scales, the potential positive feedback of soil microbial respiration in response to climate warming may be less than previously predicted.


2021 ◽  
Vol 13 (13) ◽  
pp. 7191
Author(s):  
Valerie Paelman ◽  
Philippe Van Cauwenberge ◽  
Heidi Vander Bauwhede

We empirically test whether B Corp certification affects the short- and medium-term growth rates of sustainable enterprises. These businesses are growing in popularity and prevalence but, due to their hybrid nature, often suffer from external credibility issues and competing internal logics. Because of the rigorous and time-involving audit procedure, B Corp certification potentially sends a credible signal about the sustainable nature of the enterprise to its stakeholders. In addition, the B Corp label could help to straighten out internal tensions and align the company towards its dual purpose. Hence, B Corp certification could contribute to company success. We observe 129 firms that were certified between 2013 and 2018 over a period between six years prior and five years post-certification. Using propensity score matching, we identify 129 non-certified matching companies. On this sample, we conduct a difference-in-differences panel regression analysis to investigate the effect of certification. Our dataset allows us to study how the effects of B Corp certification evolve over time, which was previously untested. Our study documents a positive effect of B Corp certification on turnover growth and also that this effect increases with the time since certification, implying that certification requires some time for its full effect to become apparent.


2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Qiushi Ning ◽  
Stephan Hättenschwiler ◽  
Xiaotao Lü ◽  
Paul Kardol ◽  
Yunhai Zhang ◽  
...  

2021 ◽  
Author(s):  
Felipe Bastida ◽  
David J. Eldridge ◽  
Carlos García ◽  
G. Kenny Png ◽  
Richard D. Bardgett ◽  
...  

AbstractThe relationship between biodiversity and biomass has been a long standing debate in ecology. Soil biodiversity and biomass are essential drivers of ecosystem functions. However, unlike plant communities, little is known about how the diversity and biomass of soil microbial communities are interlinked across globally distributed biomes, and how variations in this relationship influence ecosystem function. To fill this knowledge gap, we conducted a field survey across global biomes, with contrasting vegetation and climate types. We show that soil carbon (C) content is associated to the microbial diversity–biomass relationship and ratio in soils across global biomes. This ratio provides an integrative index to identify those locations on Earth wherein diversity is much higher compared with biomass and vice versa. The soil microbial diversity-to-biomass ratio peaks in arid environments with low C content, and is very low in C-rich cold environments. Our study further advances that the reductions in soil C content associated with land use intensification and climate change could cause dramatic shifts in the microbial diversity-biomass ratio, with potential consequences for broad soil processes.


2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (1) ◽  
Author(s):  
Yisong Huang ◽  
Shaoyong Su ◽  
Harold Snieder ◽  
Frank Treiber ◽  
Gaston Kapuku ◽  
...  

AbstractIncreased arterial stiffness measured by pulse wave velocity (PWV) is an important parameter in the assessment of cardiovascular risk. Our previous longitudinal study has demonstrated that carotid-distal PWV showed reasonable stability throughout youth and young adulthood. This stability might be driven by genetic factors that are expressed consistently over time. We aimed to illustrate the relative contributions of genetic and environmental factors to the stability of carotid-distal PWV from youth to young adulthood. We also examined potential ethnic differences. For this purpose, carotid-distal PWV was measured twice in 497 European American (EA) and African American (AA) twins, with an average interval time of 3 years. Twin modelling on PWV showed that heritability decreased over time (62–35%), with the nonshared environmental influences becoming larger. There was no correlation between the nonshared environmental factors on PWV measured at visit 1 and visit 2, with the phenotypic tracking correlation (r = 0.32) completely explained by shared genetic factors over time. Novel genetic influences were identified accounting for a significant part of the variance (19%) at the second measurement occasion. There was no evidence for ethnic differences. In summary, novel genetic effects appear during development into young adulthood and account for a considerable part of the variation in PWV. Environmental influences become larger with age for PWV.


Agriculture ◽  
2021 ◽  
Vol 11 (8) ◽  
pp. 689
Author(s):  
Valeria Ancona ◽  
Ida Rascio ◽  
Giorgia Aimola ◽  
Claudia Campanale ◽  
Paola Grenni ◽  
...  

A Monviso clone has been applied to promote PCB degradation in a soil historically contaminated by polychlorinated biphenyls (PCBs) and heavy metals (HMs). The multi-contaminated area is located in Southern Italy. PCBs, HMs, and the soil microbial community (abundance, viability, and structure) were analysed in selected plots of the poplar-treated area. At 900 days after poplar planting, chemical analyses showed that PCBs and most of HMs diminished under the Italian legal limits. The overall results suggest that the poplar clone was effective in promoting PCB rhizodegradation and HM phytostabilization. Organic carbon content increased strongly in the rhizosphere of the planted plots. Microbiological results highlighted an overall increase in microbial abundance, cell viability, and the presence of bacterial groups involved in PCB degradation. The poplar-based bioremediation technology is a nature-based solution able to promote the recovery of soil quality in terms of contaminant removal, increase in organic carbon, and stimulation of autochthonous bacterial groups able to transform PCBs.


Animals ◽  
2019 ◽  
Vol 9 (12) ◽  
pp. 1132
Author(s):  
Sarah Schwarzkopf ◽  
Asako Kinoshita ◽  
Jeannette Kluess ◽  
Susanne Kersten ◽  
Ulrich Meyer ◽  
...  

Development of calves depends on prenatal and postnatal conditions. Primiparous cows were still maturing during pregnancy, which can lead to negative intrauterine conditions and affect the calf’s metabolism. It is hypothesized that weaning calves at higher maturity has positive effects due to reduced metabolic stress. We aimed to evaluate effects of mothers’ parity and calves’ weaning age on growth performance and blood metabolites. Fifty-nine female Holstein calves (38.8 ± 5.3 kg birth weight, about 8 days old) were used in a 2 × 2 factorial experiment with factors weaning age (7 vs. 17 weeks) and parity of mother (primiparous vs. multiparous cows). Calves were randomly assigned one of these four groups. Live weight, live weight gain and morphometry increased over time and were greater in calves weaned later. Metabolic indicators except total protein were interactively affected by time and weaning age. Leptin remained low in early-weaned calves born to primiparous cows, while it increased in the other groups. The results suggest that weaning more mature calves has a positive effect on body growth, and calves born to primiparous cows particularly benefit from this weaning regimen. It also enables a smooth transition from liquid to solid feed, which might reduce the associated stress of weaning.


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