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Evidence for large microbial-mediated losses of soil carbon under anthropogenic warming

Nature Reviews Earth & Environment volume 2, pages 507–517 (2021)Cite this article

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An Author Correction to this article was published on 29 June 2021

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Abstract

Anthropogenic warming is expected to accelerate global soil organic carbon (SOC) losses via microbial decomposition, yet, there is still no consensus on the loss magnitude. In this Perspective, we argue that, despite the mechanistic uncertainty underlying these losses, there is confidence that a strong, positive land carbon–climate feedback can be expected. Two major lines of evidence support net global SOC losses with warming via increases in soil microbial metabolic activity: the increase in soil respiration with temperature and the accumulation of SOC in low mean annual temperature regions. Warming-induced SOC losses are likely to be of a magnitude relevant for emission negotiations and necessitate more aggressive emission reduction targets to limit climate change to 1.5 °C by 2100. We suggest that microbial community–temperature interactions, and how they are influenced by substrate availability, are promising research areas to improve the accuracy and precision of the magnitude estimates of projected SOC losses.

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Fig. 1: Microbial control of soil organic carbon losses to the atmosphere with anthropogenic warming.
Fig. 2: SOC stocks are negatively correlated with temperature at the global scale.
Fig. 3: Exploring the microbial–temperature relationship to improve estimates of SOC losses.
Fig. 4: Changes in the interactions between microbes and substrate availability under warming.

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Acknowledgements

We thank the reviewers for their careful reading of our manuscript and their insightful comments and suggestions. This article was conceived as a result of the Thematic Session on ‘Microbial Feedbacks to Climate Change’ presented at the British Ecological Society Annual Meeting 2018 held in Birmingham (UK). P.G.-P. is supported by a Ramón y Cajal grant from the Spanish Ministry of Science and Innovation (RYC2018-024766-I).

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Authors and Affiliations

  1. Instituto de Ciencias Agrarias, Consejo Superior de Investigaciones Científicas, Madrid, Spain

    Pablo García-Palacios

  2. Crowther Lab, Department of Environmental Systems Science, Institute of Integrative Biology, ETH Zürich, Zürich, Switzerland

    Thomas W. Crowther & Johan van den Hoogen

  3. Departamento de Biología y Geología, Física y Química Inorgánica, Universidad Rey Juan Carlos, Móstoles, Spain

    Marina Dacal

  4. Instituto Multidisciplinar para el Estudio del Medio “Ramon Margalef”, Universidad de Alicante, San Vicente del Raspeig, Spain

    Marina Dacal

  5. Geography, College of Life and Environmental Sciences, University of Exeter, Exeter, UK

    Iain P. Hartley

  6. UK Centre for Ecology & Hydrology, Environment Centre Wales, Bangor, UK

    Sabine Reinsch

  7. Terrestrial Ecology, Department of Biology, University of Copenhagen, Copenhagen, Denmark

    Riikka Rinnan

  8. Microbial Ecology, Department of Biology, Lund University, Lund, Sweden

    Johannes Rousk

  9. State Key Laboratory of Grassland Agro-ecosystems, School of Life Sciences, Lanzhou University, Lanzhou, China

    Jian-Sheng Ye

  10. The Forest School, School of the Environment, Yale University, New Haven, CT, USA

    Mark A. Bradford

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  1. Pablo García-Palacios
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Contributions

P.G.-P. and M.A.B. conceived the idea for the paper. T.W.C., J.R., J.v.d.H. and J.-S.Y. conducted the analyses. The paper was drafted by P.G.-P., T.W.C., M.D., I.P.H., S.R., R.R., J.R. and M.A.B., and all authors contributed to the final version.

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Correspondence to Pablo García-Palacios.

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Nature Reviews Earth & Environment thanks Ben Bond-Lamberty, who co-reviewed with Jinshi Jian; Jizhong Zhou and the other, anonymous, reviewer(s) for their contribution to the peer review of this work.

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The CHELSA database: https://chelsa-climate.org/

The SoilGrids database: https://soilgrids.org/

The SRDB: https://github.com/bpbond/srdb

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García-Palacios, P., Crowther, T.W., Dacal, M. et al. Evidence for large microbial-mediated losses of soil carbon under anthropogenic warming. Nat Rev Earth Environ 2, 507–517 (2021). https://doi.org/10.1038/s43017-021-00178-4

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