The influence of salinity and restoration on wetland soil microbial communities and carbon cycling in the San Francisco Bay-Delta Region

Abstract:

Climate change is predicted to increase the average salinity of the San Francisco Bay-Delta watershed as sea levels rise and alpine snow volume decreases. Wetland soil microbial communities are responsible for cycling greenhouse gases and their response to climate change will heavily influence whether increasing salinity will have a negative or positive effect on the net greenhouse gas budgets of wetlands. To better understand the underlying factors determining the balance of greenhouse gas flux in wetland soils, we targeted the microbial communities along a salinity gradient ranging from freshwater to full seawater in the San Francisco Bay-Delta region. Using DNA and RNA sequencing, coupled with greenhouse gas monitoring, we sampled sixteen sites capturing a range of wetland plant types and restoration states. We determined a suite of soil biogeochemical parameters including moisture, carbon and nutrient contents, pH, sulfate, chloride, and trace metal concentrations. The results of our microbial diversity survey (16S rRNA gene Illumina tag sequencing) showed that salinity and sampling location were the primary drivers of belowground microbial community composition. Freshwater wetland soils, with lower sulfate concentrations, produced more methane than saline sites and we found a parallel increase in the relative abundance of methanogen populations in the high-methane samples. Surprisingly, wetland restoration status did not significantly alter microbial community composition, despite orders of magnitude greater methane flux in restored wetlands compared to reference sites. Deeper metagenomic and metatranscriptomic sequencing in a restored wetland allowed us to further evaluate the roles of methanogen abundance and activity in shaping soil methane production. Our study links belowground microbial communities with their greenhouse gas production, providing a mechanistic microbial framework for assessing climate change feedbacks in wetland soils resulting from sea level rise.