Microbial Diversity Reduction in Soil by Long-Term Climate Warming

Dave, Mayank; Panwar, Kartika; Dadhich, Itika; Sharma, Yagya; Malodia, Anupriya; Shaik, Nagaraju

doi:https://doi.org/10.1155/2022/7670890

Advances in Materials Science and Engineering

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Volume 2022 | Article ID 7670890 | https://doi.org/10.1155/2022/7670890

Microbial Diversity Reduction in Soil by Long-Term Climate Warming

Mayank Dave,¹Kartika Panwar,¹Itika Dadhich,¹Yagya Sharma,¹Anupriya Malodia,¹and Nagaraju Shaik²

Academic Editor: Samson Jerold Samuel Chelladurai

Received19 Jul 2022

Accepted02 Sept 2022

Published15 Sept 2022

Abstract

Global environmental changes are altering where species dwell and how they interact with one another. Organisms exist in intricate communities with thousands of different species, some of which are beneficial, some of which are destructive, and others of which have no influence at all. Because natural communities are made up of organisms with widely disparate life histories and modes of change, it is improbable that they will all react in the same manner to changes in the environment. The consequences of global change on interactions between plants and herbivores and plants and pollinators have been extensively reported. Less attention has been made to the interactions of soil bacteria and plants, as well as soil microorganisms. Because soil microorganisms govern how nutrients vary, feed nutrients to plants, allow neighbours to cohabit, and manage plant populations, changes in how soil microorganisms and plants interact may have a significant impact on the sorts of plants in an ecosystem and how it operates. This study investigates how soil interactions impact soil bacteria and how they interact with one another, both directly and indirectly. It also covers novel and fascinating areas of inquiry, as well as the implications that changes in these relationships have on the makeup and operation of ecosystems.

1. Introduction

Changes in the climate are changing where species live and how they interact with each other [1]. Natural communities are difficult to comprehend since they are made up of organisms that live quite varied lifestyles, can withstand varying temperatures, and move in various ways. Interactions between members of a community can also be beneficial, detrimental, or have little to no influence. These interactions may shift when the environment is stressed [2]. Several researchers suggested the microbial diversity reduction in soil by various techniques [3]. Fewer studies have concentrated on soil communities, despite the fact that changes in species interactions brought on by climate change have an impact on biodiversity and the efficiency of terrestrial ecosystems [4]. Soil organisms and plants collaborate in a variety of ways to keep an ecosystem alive and growing. In reality, the way soil microorganisms interact with one another and with plants may alter patterns of plant and animal abundance, variety, and composition [1]. When the combined effects of diseases, symbiotic mutualists, and decomposers degrade the soil of plants as a whole, negative plant-microbial interactions occur. Interactions are considered helpful when the benefits provided by the soil community improve plant performance, such as biomass output and survival. Understanding how ecosystems work necessitates an understanding of how interactions between soil microbes, soil bacteria, and plants evolve as the environment changes. This will highlight how important processes such as soil carbon storage and net primary production are [5]. Microbial activities reflect the microbiological procedures for soil microbes that potentially indicate soil quality and rely on soil microbes and mineralize the organic nutrients for its expansion and growth.

Surrounding carbon feedback from terrestrial ecosystems to the atmosphere, ecosystem models are currently rife with uncertainty [6]. To determine how much carbon may be stored in terrestrial ecosystems, a great deal of experimental research has concentrated on developing more accurate forecasts of carbon flows. The ability of soils to sequester carbon has helped to temper the increase in atmospheric (CO₂) because of their capability to store significant amounts of carbon [7]. Climate, parent material, soil age and texture, geography, plant kind, and soil community make-up are all factors that regulate how much carbon soil can contain. However, microbial decomposers ultimately govern the slowest stages of decomposition and, ultimately, how many abiotic factors regulate decomposition. However, no one understands how microbial activity influences the movement of carbon between plants, soil, and the atmosphere [8].

2. Background

When carbon from plants and animals goes into the soil, the amount of carbon in the soil goes down. This is because the soil community’s activity, such as the rate of decomposition, goes up in response to the amount of carbon that goes into the soil. This could make carbon-climate feedback even worse [9]. Microbial communities may modify critical plant properties such as productivity and litter quality, which regulates the flow of carbon in the carbon cycle, in addition, to directly regulating the breakdown process. Future terrestrial carbon feedback will depend a lot on microbial activity but not much is known about how temperature affects the interactions between microorganisms and plants [10].

The soil will examine the effects of climate change on both direct and indirect interactions between soil microorganisms and plants. It will also investigate what changes in these interactions could signify for how ecosystems are constructed and function. Some of the most important questions regarding this subject that remain unanswered. While much has been discovered about the direct impacts of climate change on how bacteria function [11]. Other ecological interactions can also change how important things operate [12].

3. Research Problem

Long-term climate change is reducing microbial diversity in soil, but there are also new business problems. Warming is projected to increase the quantity of oligotrophic bacteria due to reduced soil moisture and less labile carbon [13]. On the other side, it is predicted that eCO₂ would promote the growth of plants and microbes that will utilize nitrogen from the soil. As a result, soil carbon cycling is predicted to decelerate. This study is primarily concerned with how the soil microbiome influences the organic carbon cycle in the soil, as well as how climate change affects the soil carbon cycle.

4. Aim and Objectives

4.1. Aim

To study the impact of microbial diversity in reducing soil by long-term climate warming.

The aim of choosing the topic is to study the impact of microbial diversity controls the functions of soil microbes, and aid the researcher to estimate productivity and healthy soil for use. Thus, the microorganisms and insects support in breaking down the crop residues and manures by ingesting them and mixing them with other minerals and the process to recycle the energy and plant the nutrients. Also, the information helps the researcher to guess the climate and environmental impacts that influence the soil.

4.2. Objectives

(i)“To identify the direct impacts of climatic change on soil communities and plants”(ii)“To recognize the impacts of climatic change on soil communities and plants”(iii)“To study the emerging technologies, advance our understanding of plant-microbe responses to climatic change.”

The objective is to control the organic matter and cycle to regulate the minerals in soil.

5. Literature Review

5.1. “Direct Impacts of Climatic Change on Soil Communities and Plants”

Because soil community members are climatic in how they perform, how sensitive they are to temperature, and how fast they develop, climate change alters their relative function and how they work [14]. Several effects have looked at how climate change affects the structure and function of microorganisms in a direct way. [10] For instance, a 5°C increase in temperature in a temperate forest increased the amount of soil bacteria and altered the community’s bacteria-to-fungus ratio [15]. As a result of their trait to change, microbial traits enable resistance in microbial communities, which is how they react to warming and other disturbances. Resilience, on the other hand, is when the community recovers its original composition after stress, which is how microbial communities respond to stress [16]. For instance, certain microbial groups control methane synthesis, nitrogen fixation, and nitrogen conversion and removal in ecosystems. The number of organisms in charge of a process can change, and this can directly affect how quickly certain processes take place. However, certain larger-scale processes, including nitrogen mineralization, have a more direct relationship with abiotic variables such as temperature and moisture than with the composition of the microbial population. This is because a range of organisms, which are responsible for these processes, are at work [17].

The amount of moisture in the soil changes often in reaction to temperature changes. This might explain why different studies on how microbial populations respond to climate change do not always provide the same results. For instance, diffusion and the amount of interaction between the microorganisms and the accessible substrate might slow down the rate of microbial activity at higher temperatures. While fungal communities, which develop more slowly than bacteria, may take longer to respond to sudden changes in moisture, bacteria may [18].

Drought also shows how fungi and bacteria respond in different ways to changes in temperature. Even slight changes in the amount of water in the soil, such as a 30 percent drop in its ability to store water, can cause the fungal communities in the soil to shift from one dominant member to another. However, communities of bacteria stay the same. These patterns suggest that fungi are more adaptive than bacteria overfrequent cycles of wet and dry. Soil communities that have been accustomed to having little water or cycling through numerous wet and dry cycles may be less likely to alter or shift when water patterns change. The composition and function of microorganisms vary when the climate changes due to how they interact with one another and with the ambient temperature and humidity regimes.

Using reciprocal transplants of plants and/or soils over environmental gradients might also be a useful approach to explore these concerns. Using PLFA and phylogenetic dissimilarity methods, this approach would investigate temperature and moisture changes in the microbial population from both a functional and evolutionary standpoint. This is a rough approach; a more detailed examination would be preferable [19]. If this kind of experiment was carried out in ecosystems where C had been modified for a long time (such as free-air carbon enrichment sites), it would be possible to tell the type between the effects on old (depleted C from the experiment) and new (added C from the recent root and litter inputs) soil carbon dynamics.

5.2. “Indirect Impacts of Climatic Change on Soil Communities and Plants”

Most people know that climate change makes plant species move, but less is known about how soil microorganisms might change their range to keep a positive or negative interaction between plant and soil ecosystems [1]. Because plants do not move much, soil biota may adjust to climate change more slowly than plants. It is unclear if microorganisms can migrate about in microscopic communities and it is also unclear whether changes in their ability to move around are linked to changes in larger-scale processes such as decomposition.

However, we should be aware that the many plants that plants and microorganisms might transmit can alter how plants develop and interact with other plants in a community. Morriën et al. [20] found that some species that moved to new places had better defenses against herbivores above ground and/or less disease-causing activity in their soils than similar native plants in the new range. If plants that do well in new environments have more plant defense compounds such as polyphenols because of the environment, the quality of the litter input will go down, and the decomposer community will change in terms of its composition or activity.

Despite the fact that we do not know much about how the disjointed geographic movement of plants and microorganisms affects how plants adapt and flourish in new environments, research on plant invasions suggests that a lack of ectomycorrhizal fungi can block or impede pine invasions. Also, changes in location may influence how the microbial community is formed and functions but little is known about this [1]. However, little is understood about how microbial migration may impact large-scale processes such as decomposition and nutrient mineralization. We do not always know how quickly isolated microbial populations can adjust to climate change.

5.3. “Emerging Technologies Advance Our Understanding of Plant-Microbe Responses to Climatic Change”

Researchers were left with numerous unanswered issues about which methods produce the most accurate results and how to quickly analyze these enormous datasets as more people started using these methods. The 16s rRNA gene amplicon sequencing is a common technique for identifying the locations of bacteria in an environment [21]. This gives us a ton of information at a depth where species accumulation curves have started to fill in but it says nothing about potential changes in community communities. Some researchers have started to employ shotgun metagenomics to understand the composition of microbial communities and their functional potential by measuring the quantity of functional genes present in a certain environment. This approach provides data regarding potential sources but it falls short of applicant sequencing. As a result, uncommon taxa could be unnoticed [22].

It is crucial to start gathering samples of microbial communities at a scale appropriate for their variety or function, especially in light of the numerous new technologies seeking to understand how microorganisms interact in soils. It may be challenging to find significant patterns of diversity in these communities on such a wide scale given the diversity of species found in a soil core. The scale of the soil aggregate, where there is a large lot of variety among soil aggregates, or the scale of the plant root-soil interface is where microorganisms interact with one another [23]. To truly understand how microorganisms interact with one another and with the plants they live on, future research should start with the questions they are asking regarding diversity and/or function and adapt the way samples are gathered to fit.

At the plant root-soil interface, where various microorganisms dwell and interact with plant roots, technological breakthroughs are enabling us to learn more about the molecular basis of plant-microbial interactions [24]. Some of these bacteria from the soil enter and dwell inside the plant root. Nobody knows how these microorganisms get into the plant’s root system, though. What takes at the molecular level to allow microorganisms to bypass the plant’s innate immune system and infect the plant root aggressively? Scientists may lay the molecular groundwork for these interactions by exploiting cutting-edge sequencing techniques that enable fast, low-cost sequencing of whole animal genomes. Table 1 shows the effects of microbial activities.

6. Methodology

Information that has already been compiled from primary sources and is accessible for researchers to identify and utilize in their own study is known as secondary data. It is a type of data that have already been collected. Data from the study may have been collected for a project and then made accessible for use by other researchers. The data may have been collected for a variety of uses without a stated study objective, similar to how the national census was conducted [25]. Depending on the study, secondary data may be viewed as primary in another.

Secondary data were collected from books, personal sources, journals, newspapers, websites, government documents, and other sources. Secondary data are known to be easier to discover than main data. To use these sources, you must conduct very little research and rely on individuals. Secondary data sources are increasingly simpler to locate because of the growth of electronic media and the Internet.

7. Findings

Heat waves, droughts, frosts, fires, and storms are becoming more common as a result of climate change. Because of these factors, large-scale things such as a region’s net primary productivity and the physical and biological properties of the soil might change [26]. The stability of an ecosystem following a disturbance is influenced by factors such as how frequently it has been disturbed in the past and the makeup and diversity of the community [27]. Similar to above-ground diversity, there is mounting evidence that diversity below ground plays a significant part in a stable, multipurpose ecosystem [28].

As an illustration, the diversity of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi below ground can have an impact on the diversity of plants above ground, the percentage of an area that is covered by plants, the aggregation of the soil, the moisture content of the soil, and the ways by which carbon and nitrogen are stored in the soil. Because they contain more species that can withstand stress, varied bacterial communities also have biomass that is more stable under stress. In 58 research covering many different ecosystems, microbial biomass turnover was slower when microbial stress was reduced (for example, when there was more carbon and nitrogen in the soil). This shows that ecological functions grow more stable with time [29]. Human-caused changes in precipitation patterns, such as bigger and more frequent storms, can have an impact on species gains and losses. To forecast how ecosystems will adapt to global change, it is necessary to understand how the stability of communities below ground influences how communities above ground respond to perturbations. Even if severe events occur seldom, they are likely to have long-term consequences on how plants and microorganisms interact, as well as how microbes interact with one another.

8. Conclusion

When examining how plant and soil communities respond to natural climate changes or at a particular moment in time, their interactions may not be unpredictable. Due to the temperature sensitivity of carbon cycling, even minute variations in temperature can result in significant releases of carbon from the soil and back into the atmosphere. The temperature has a significant impact on both the amount of carbon broken down in the soil and the amount of carbon in plants. However, it is unclear how much of a difference there is between the direct and indirect effects of climate change on soil carbon dynamics, particularly in transitional ecosystems. We believe that the direct effects of climate change on the composition and function of microbial communities may be less severe than the indirect effects of climate change on microorganisms via plants. However, these effects need to be studied in the proper temporal and geographical contexts, ideally through microbe-centered studies that add to the body of plant-centered climate change research already in existence. To determine which species are most susceptible to climate change and whose reactions have an influence on how microbial communities operate, microbe studies will need to make use of new technologies.

In the long run, it will be vital to be able to anticipate community stability in the face of climate change, the consequences of catastrophic events, and ecological tipping points. To determine whether the direct effects of climate change on ecosystem composition and function are equal to or greater than changes in microbe and plant-microbe interactions caused by climate change, we must first determine the best methods for observing, measuring, and scaling these interactions.

Data Availability

The data used to support the findings of this study are included within the article.

Conflicts of Interest

The authors declare that they have no conflicts of interest.

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Copyright

Copyright © 2022 Mayank Dave et al. This is an open access article distributed under the Creative Commons Attribution License, which permits unrestricted use, distribution, and reproduction in any medium, provided the original work is properly cited.

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