Professor University of California, Irvine Irvine, CA, United States
Usually resilience is a good thing. For soil microbiomes facing drought, physiological acclimation, community shifts, dispersal, and evolution can facilitate resilience and maintain ecosystem functioning. But what if that function is soil carbon decomposition? Resilience among heterotrophic microbes could lead to soil carbon loss with drought and precipitation extremes. On the other hand, microbes could promote carbon storage by boosting plant resilience to drought and forming decay-resistant metabolites. We need to know how these opposing forces will play out to predict soil carbon balance with changing precipitation and develop effective strategies to sequester carbon in soils.
