Soil microbial communities are more disrupted by extreme drought than by gradual climate shifts under different land-use intensities

作者：Lena Philipp, Еvgenia Blagodatskaya, Mika Tarkka, Thomas Reitz · 发表于：Frontiers in Microbiology · 年份：2025 · DOI：10.3389/fmicb.2025.1649443 · 被引用次数：11 · 研究领域：Soil Carbon and Nitrogen Dynamics、Microbial Community Ecology and Physiology、Biocrusts and Microbial Ecology

Introduction: Extreme events like droughts are expected to increase in frequency due to climate change and will affect ecosystems and their associated key functional components particularly soil microbial communities. Studies simultaneously addressing a range of climate stressors, such as extreme drought events and gradual long-term shifts in precipitation and temperature on soil microbial diversity, community composition and function in agricultural systems are limited. Methods: Here, we present a data set from a field site in Central Germany comprising two spring growing seasons, one with normal precipitation amount, the other experiencing an extreme drought. Further, the experiment included a climate treatment simulating climate change induced gradual shifts in precipitation and temperature in croplands and grasslands under varying management intensities. Results and discussion: Our findings demonstrate that the extreme drought had a stronger effect on microbial biomass, functions and community composition than the mild experimental climate treatment mediated by soil moisture differences. The fungal communities were more responsive to the drought than the bacterial community, particularly in croplands, where we observed higher C-cycling enzymatic activities under drought. In contrast, microbial functions in grasslands remained largely unchanged in grasslands under drought, implying lower sensitivity to drought in grassland than cropland systems. However, intensively manage...