Abstract
The sensitivity of soil microbial respiration to warming (Q10) remains a major source of uncertainty surrounding the projections of soil carbon emissions to the atmosphere as the factors driving Q10 patterns across ecosystems have been assessed in isolation from each other. Here we report the results of a warming experiment using soils from 332 sites across all continents and major biomes to simultaneously evaluate the main drivers of global Q10 patterns. Compared with biochemical recalcitrance, mineral protection, substrate quantity and environmental factors, the soil microbiome (that is, microbial biomass and bacterial taxa) explained the largest portion of variation in Q10 values. Our work provides solid evidence that soil microbiomes largely govern the responses of soil heterotrophic respiration to warming and thus need to be explicitly accounted for when assessing land carbon–climate feedbacks.
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Data availability
The raw data associated with this study are available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.20776243 (ref. 75).
Code availability
The code associated with this study is available at https://doi.org/10.6084/m9.figshare.20776243 (ref. 75).
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Acknowledgements
T.S.-S. and A.G. were supported by FEDER/Ministerio de Ciencia, Innovación y Universidades-Agencia Estatal de Investigación/Proyect (CGL2017-88124-R). M.D.-B. was supported by the BES grant agreement number LRB17\1019 (MUSGONET), innovation programme under Marie Sklodowska-Curie Grant Agreement 702057 (CLIMIFUN), Ramón y Cajal grant (RYC2018-025483-I), a project from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (PID2020-115813RA-I00; SOIL4GROWTH) and a project PAIDI 2020 from the Junta de Andalucía (P20_00879). F.T.M. is supported by the European Research Council grant 647038 (BIODESERT), Generalitat Valenciana grant CIDEGENT/2018/041, by the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (grant PID2020-116578RB-I00) and by the contract between ETH Zurich and University of Alicante ‘Mapping terrestrial ecosystem structure at the global scale’. E.G. acknowledges funding from Generalitat Valenciana and Europen Social Fund grant (APOSTD/2021/188). T.S.-S., A.G. and M.D.-B. were also supported by TED2021-130908B-C41 (URBANCHANGE). N.E. gratefully acknowledges the support of iDiv, which is funded by the German Research Foundation (DFG – FZT 118, 202548816), as well as by the DFG (Ei 862/29-1; Ei 862/31-1). C.C.-D. is supported by a Post-doc Research Scholarship in the context of the FCT funded project SoilRecon with reference BIPD_01_2021_FCT-PTDC/BIA-CBI/2340/ 2020 and acknowledges the Center for Research and Development in Agrifood Systems and Sustainability (CISAS) with references UIDB/05937/2020 and UIDP/05937/2020, also funded by FCT national funds. We thank the researchers originally involved in the BIODESERT, CLIMIFUN and MUSGONET projects.
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T.S.-S., P.G.-P. and M.D.-B. conceptualized the project. M.D.-B., F.T.M. and A.G. acquired funding. T.S.-S., M.D.-B., P.G.-P., F.T.M., C.P., E.G., B.K.S., J.W., C.C.-D., N.E. and A.G. conducted the investigation. T.S.-S. wrote the paper with all authors contributing to the drafts.
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Sáez-Sandino, T., García-Palacios, P., Maestre, F.T. et al. The soil microbiome governs the response of microbial respiration to warming across the globe. Nat. Clim. Chang. 13, 1382–1387 (2023). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01868-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41558-023-01868-1
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