Response of soil microbial communities to climate warming: from local to global scale

Climate warming represents one of the most complex issues of the present time and climate models predict further increase of temperature in the next decades.

Soils worldwide represent the largest terrestrial carbon (C) pool, exceeding the amount of C stored in the atmosphere and plant biomass.

Microbes are known to play key roles in both soil C stabilization and its release into the atmosphere as carbon dioxide or methane.

Rising temperatures could accelerate the activity of microbial decomposers resulting in greater losses of C from soils into the atmosphere.

However, the extent of microbial response to predicted climate change at global scale is unknown and the details of the structural and functional shifts in soil microbial communities under warming represent a major knowledge gap.

Here, I propose to characterize the functional response of “local” soil bacterial and fungal communities to warming in Arctic tundra as northern latitudes represent one of the most vulnerable areas to climate change.

This will be achieved by the analysis of in situ ecosystem manipulation experiment simulating increased summer temperatures using metagenomic and metatranscriptomic approaches.

In order to assess the global scale responses of soil microbial taxa to climate warming worldwide, I will conduct a meta-analysis of microbial responses to warming treatments utilizing the combination of sequencing and environmental data available in published literature.

The validity of the modeled responses of microbial taxa will be checked using the analysis of communities from the “local” experiment.

The project will give an answer on the “global” future of microbial communities as well as on the functional responses of soil microbes to climate warming on the local scale.

Proposed project will allow to applicant gain the knowledge of novel methods in microbial ecology and represent important transition phase towards applicant’s professional maturity and independent future research career.