Impacts of forest disturbance on the soil microbiome. Monitoring Underground Disturbance BioBank

Our primary objective is to generate a soil sample 'BioBank' that will facilitate long-term investigations of soil microbial community responses to extreme weather. Taking advantage of the widespread damage caused by storms Arwen, Eunice and Franklin, which severely impacted forests across the UK, we will sample soil cores in georeferenced locations along forest disturbance gradients and permanently archive them at Imperial College London. This will permit future investigation of microbial community succession and its relationship to forest recovery: by returning to the same sites as the forests recover and canopy gaps close, we can assemble an unprecedentedly deep and broad survey of soil microbial community dynamics across space and time. However, there is an extremely limited window of time in which to capture the earliest microbial community responses, because microbial communities can quickly track environmental shifts. Our second objective is to assess the extent to which microbial communities shift in the immediate aftermath of forest disturbance. We will achieve this by quantifying differences in soil bacterial community structure between forests with the same tree community and topographic position, but different intensities of Arwen/Eunice/Franklin-related tree mortality. Very few studies have attempted to quantify such belowground responses, which are likely substantial due to soil perturbation caused by tree uprooting, massive influxes of plant litter, and microclimate changes under new canopy gaps.