Resistance-recovery tradeoff of soil microbial communities under altered rain regimes: An experimental test across European agroecosystems

With the increased occurrence of climate extremes, there is an urgent need to better understand how management strategies affect the capacity of the soil microbial community to maintain its ecosystem functions (e.g. nutrient cycling).
To address this issue, intact monoliths were extracted from conventional and ecological managed grasslands in three countries across Europe and exposed under common air condition (temperature and moisture) to one of three altered rain regimes (dry, wet and intermittent wet/dry) as compared to a normal regime. Subsequently, we compared the resistance and recovery of the soil microbial biomass, potential enzyme activities and community composition.
The microbial community composition differed with soil management and rain regimes. Soil microbial biomass increased from the wetter to the dryer rain regime, paralleling an increase of available carbon and nutrients, suggesting low sensitivity to soil moisture reduction but nutritional limitations of soil ...