Meta-analysis of the effects of abiotic factors on plant microbes

The abiotic environment exerts strong effects on plant-associated microbes, shaping their interactions with plants and resulting ecosystem processes. However, these abiotic effects on plant-microbe interactions are often highly specific and contingent on the abiotic driver or microbial group, requiring synthesis work describing general patterns and from this generate hypotheses and guide mechanistic work. To address this, we conducted a meta-analysis of the effects of climate change-related abiotic factors, namely warming, drought, and eCO2, on plant-associated microbes distinguishing by microbial taxonomic or biological group (bacteria, fungi or virus) and the plant part where microbes are found or associated with (phyllosphere or rhizosphere). We found abiotic driver-specific patterns, whereby drought significantly reduced microbial abundance, whereas warming and eCO2 had no significant effects. In addition, these abiotic effects were contingent on the microbial taxonomic group, with ..., Data collection
We carried out an extensive literature search in Scopus database in May 2022 using a combination of the following keywords: ((plant OR tree OR shrub) AND (drought OR warming OR co2 OR flooding OR wind OR salt OR salin OR deposit) AND (microb OR bacter OR fung OR virus OR protist OR alga OR nematod OR mycorrhiz)). We retained only articles, book chapters, reviews, theses, dissertations and abstracts published in English. To further limit the search to relevant papers, we filtered outputs to consider only the following research areas: Agricultural and Biological science, Biochemistry, Genetics and Molecular Biology, Environmental Science, Immunology and Microbiology. This search spanned published work from 1967 to 2022. In addition, we also surveyed the references in review articles on climate change and interactions between plants and microbes and included any studies that were missed in our Scopus search. In total, our initial search yielded 5450 papers.
To be included i..., , # Abiotic factors and plant microbes

[https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.dfn2z3594](https://doi.org/10.5061/dryad.dfn2z3594)

In this study, we conducted a meta-analysis testing the effects of climate change-related abiotic factors on plant-associated microbes. To this end, we analyzed studies involving experimental manipulations of climate change-related abiotic factors (e.g., warming, drought, and eCO2) and measuring abundance of microbes (e.g., virus, bacteria, fungus) in the phyllosphere or rhizosphere. We aimed at: (1) Describing the overall magnitude and direction of effects of abiotic factors on plant-associated microbes (2) Testing whether such abiotic effects were contingent on the type of microbe, namely bacteria, fungus or virus, and plant part where microbes are found, namely the phyllosphere or rhizosphere. In doing so, this study furthers our understanding of climate change-related abiotic forcing on plant–associated microbes and its implications for ecosystem responses to glo...