Food web uncertainties influence predictions of climate change effects on soil carbon sequestration in heathlands

Carbon cycling models consider soil carbon sequestration a key process for climate change mitigation. However, these models mostly focus on abiotic soil processes and, despite its recognized critical mechanistic role, do not explicitly include interacting soil organisms. Here, we use a literature study to show that even a relatively simple soil community (heathland soils) contains large uncertainties in temporal and spatial food web structure. Next, we used a Lotka–Volterra-based food web model to demonstrate that, due to these uncertainties, climate change can either increase or decrease soil carbon sequestration to varying extents. Both the strength and direction of changes strongly depend on (1) the main consumer’s (enchytraeid worms) feeding preferences and (2) whether decomposers (fungi) or enchytraeid worms are more sensitive to stress. Hence, even for a soil community with a few dominant functional groups and a simulation model with a few parameters, filling these knowledge gaps is a critical first step towards the explicit integration of soil food web dynamics into carbon cycling models in order to better assess the role soils play in climate change mitigation

Links Between Heathland Fungal Biomass Mineralization, Melanization, and Hydrophobicity

Comprehending the decomposition process is crucial for our understanding of the mechanisms of carbon (C) sequestration in soils. The decomposition of plant biomass has been extensively studied. It revealed that extrinsic biomass properties that restrict its access to decomposers influence decomposition more than intrinsic ones that are only related to its chemical structure. Fungal biomass has been much less investigated, even though it contributes to a large extent to soil organic matter, and is characterized by specific biochemical properties. In this study, we investigated the extent to which decomposition of heathland fungal biomass was affected by its hydrophobicity (extrinsic property) and melanin content (intrinsic property). We hypothesized that, as for plant biomass, hydrophobicity would have a greater impact on decomposition than melanin content. Mineralization was determined as the mineralization of soil organic carbon (SOC) into CO 2 by headspace GC/MS after inoculation by a heathland soil microbial community. Results show that decomposition was not affected by hydrophobicity, but was negatively correlated with melanin content. We argue that it may indicate that either melanin content is both an intrinsic and extrinsic property, or that some soil decomposers evolved the ability to use surfactants to access to hydrophobic biomass. In the latter case, biomass hydrophobicity should not be considered as a crucial extrinsic factor. We also explored the ecology of decomposition, melanin content, and hydrophobicity, among heathland soil fungal guilds. Ascomycete black yeasts had the highest melanin content, and hyaline Basidiomycete yeasts the lowest. Hydrophobicity was an all-or-nothing trait, with most isolates being hydrophobic. </p

Towards more predictive and interdisciplinary climate change ecosystem experiments

We thank the Flemish government (through Hercules Stichting big infrastructure and the Fund for Scientific Research Flanders project G0H4117N) and LSM (Limburg Sterk Merk, project 271) for providing funds to build the UHasselt Ecotron; Hasselt University for both funding and policy support (project BOF12BR01 and Methusalem project 08M03VGRJ); and the ecotron research committee for comments on the experimental design. We also thank Regional Landscape Kempen and Maasland for its collaboration and support. N.W., S.L., A.N. and I.V. are funded by Research Foundation-Flanders (FWO).Peer reviewedPostprin