Predicting the stability of soil communities and functions under climate change

Soil communities play important roles in multiple ecosystem functions, including carbon and nitrogen cycling. Divergent shifts in soil community composition under climate changes could therefore have dramatic consequences for ecosystem service provision. Yet, we know little about the functional role of different soil community groups, their varying abilities to resist and recover from disturbances, and how shifts in community composition influences ecosystem functions.

This project will use experiments to develop a novel framework for predicting the stability of soil communities and functions under climate change. The framework accounts for high functional redundancy in soil systems, by characterising soil communities according to broad functional traits, and will elucidate the functional role of each group under control, soil warming, drought, and flood treatments.

The central hypothesis tested is that the functional traits of soil community groups strongly influence both soil community and ecosystem function responses to climate change related stressors (Figure 1).

This new process-based understanding of the links between soil communities and functions will be translated according to fundamental principles from ecological theory and integrated in a mechanistic agent-based model (ABM). The ABM then allows us to determine how functional group responses shape ecosystem multifunctionality, and the interactive effects of disturbance events related to climate change on the stability of soil communities and functions.

Importantly, the ABM forms a basis for better anticipating how the interplay between soil communities and functions drive ecosystem resilience under climate change in the future.