Long-term soil warming study on bacterial diversity

Across biomes, soil biodiversity promotes ecosystem functions. However, whether this relationship will be maintained under climate change is uncertain. Here, using two long-term warming experiments, we investigated how warming affects the relationship between ecosystem functions and microbial diversity across seasons, soil horizons, and sites. We measured seven different ecosystem functions, which covered both carbon and nitrogen cycling processes, as well as soil nutrient pools. We also surveyed bacterial and fungal community diversity. We found that the relationship between ecosystem function and bacterial diversity was unaffected by warming for both the mineral and organic horizon, but fall significantly increased ecosystem function in the organic horizon. We also observed that the relationship between ecosystem function and fungal diversity was site dependent and that warming impacted EMF in a season-dependent manner, reducing in the mineral horizon compared to the organic horizon. Our findings on the effects of long-term warming on the ecosystem function microbial diversity relationship cannot be understood without the context of season.