Effects of Soil Warming on Bacterial Degradation of Carbohydrates at Harvard Forest 2011

As Earth’s climate warms, soil carbon pools and the microbes that process them may change, altering the way in which carbon is recycled in soil. We used bacterial cultivation to evaluate the hypothesis that experimentally raising soil temperatures by 5°C for 20 years increased the potential for temperate forest soil microbial communities to degrade carbohydrates. A greater proportion of the 295 bacteria from 6 phyla (10 classes, 14 orders, and 34 families) isolated from heated plots in the 20-year experiment were able to depolymerize cellulose and xylan than bacterial isolates from control soils. These findings indicate that the enrichment of bacteria capable of degrading carbohydrates could be important for accelerated carbon cycling in a warmer world. Data for the isolates from the Harvard Forest culturing project is archived at https://osf.io/ahb2v/.