Journal
GLOBAL CHANGE BIOLOGY
Volume 21, Issue 11, Pages 4076-4085Publisher
WILEY
DOI: 10.1111/gcb.13011
Keywords
biodiversity loss; carbon dynamics; drought; long-term experiments; microbial activity; plant biomass
Funding
- German Research Foundation (DFG) [Ei 862/2]
- German Centre for Integrative Biodiversity Research (iDiv) Halle-Jena-Leipzig - German Research Foundation [FZT 118]
- DFG [RO2397/4]
- Max Planck Society
- University of Jena
- Division Of Environmental Biology
- Direct For Biological Sciences [1242531, 1120064] Funding Source: National Science Foundation
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Soil microbial biomass is a key determinant of carbon dynamics in the soil. Several studies have shown that soil microbial biomass significantly increases with plant species diversity, but it remains unclear whether plant species diversity can also stabilize soil microbial biomass in a changing environment. This question is particularly relevant as many global environmental change (GEC) factors, such as drought and nutrient enrichment, have been shown to reduce soil microbial biomass. Experiments with orthogonal manipulations of plant diversity and GEC factors can provide insights whether plant diversity can attenuate such detrimental effects on soil microbial biomass. Here, we present the analysis of 12 different studies with 14 unique orthogonal plant diversity 9 GEC manipulations in grasslands, where plant diversity and at least one GEC factor (elevated CO2, nutrient enrichment, drought, earthworm presence, or warming) were manipulated. Our results show that higher plant diversity significantly enhances soil microbial biomass with the strongest effects in long-term field experiments. In contrast, GEC factors had inconsistent effects with only drought having a significant negative effect. Importantly, we report consistent non-significant effects for all 14 interactions between plant diversity and GEC factors, which indicates a limited potential of plant diversity to attenuate the effects of GEC factors on soil microbial biomass. We highlight that plant diversity is a major determinant of soil microbial biomass in experimental grasslands that can influence soil carbon dynamics irrespective of GEC.
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