B21D-0490
Long- and short-term temperature responses of microbially-mediated boreal soil organic matter transformations

Tuesday, 15 December 2015
Poster Hall (Moscone South)
Kyungjin Min1, Kate M Buckeridge1, Kate A Edwards2, Susan E Ziegler3 and Sharon A Billings4, (1)University of Kansas, Lawrence, KS, United States, (2)Natural Resources Canada - Canadian Forest Service, Edmonton, AB, Canada, (3)Memorial University of Newfoundland, St John's, NL, Canada, (4)Univ Kansas, Lawrence, KS, United States
Abstract:
Microorganisms use exoenzymes to decay soil organic matter into assimilable substrates, some of which are transformed into CO2. Microbial CO2 efflux contributes up to 60% of soil respiration, a feature that can change with temperature due to altered exoenzyme activities (short-term) and microbial communities producing different exoenzymes (longer-term). Often, however, microbial temperature responses are masked by factors that also change with temperature in soil, making accurate projections of microbial CO2 efflux with warming challenging.

Using soils along a natural climate gradient similar in most respects except for temperature regime (Newfoundland Labrador Boreal Ecosystem Latitudinal Transect), we investigated short-vs. long-term temperature responses of microbially-mediated organic matter transformations. While incubating soils at 5, 15, and 25°C for 84 days, we measured exoenzyme activities, CO2 efflux rates and biomass, and extracted DNA at multiple times. We hypothesized that short-term, temperature-induced increases in exoenzyme activities and CO2 losses would be smaller in soils from warmer regions, because microbes presumably adapted to warmer regions should use assimilable substrates more efficiently and thus produce exoenzymes at a lower rate.

While incubation temperature generally induced greater exoenzyme activities (p<0.001), exoenzymes’ temperature responses depended on enzymes and regions (p<0.001). Rate of CO2 efflux was affected by incubation temperature (P<0.001), but not by region. Microbial biomass and DNA sequencing will reveal how microbial community abundance and composition change with short-vs. longer-term temperature change. Though short-term microbial responses to temperature suggest higher CO2 efflux and thus lower efficiency of resource use with warming, longer-term adaptations of microbial communities to warmer climates remain unknown; this work helps fill that knowledge gap.