Original title: Soil bacterial networks are less stable under drought than fungal networks
Bacteria and fungi live in soil, where their communities help ecosystems work. Researchers studied how drought affects the links between microbes that tend to occur together; these links form co-occurrence networks. Drought made bacterial networks more prone to instability, but the researchers did not find the same effect in fungal networks. Changes in plants after drought lowered soil moisture, helping explain why effects on bacteria and their networks lasted.
Imagine a group of people who often team up to get chores done. When one person changes their routine, the usual teamwork can become less steady, while another group may keep working as before. In this paper, the chore teams stand for soil microbes, and the way their teamwork changes under drought stands for shifts in their networks.
Soil microbes help ecosystems function, and drought may change how their communities hold together. In grassland mesocosms, bacterial changes also link more strongly to soil functioning during recovery than fungal changes do, pointing to a possible lasting effect on plants and future disturbance resilience.
The abstract reports results from grassland mesocosms, so it does not establish that the same network changes occur in every soil ecosystem. It also does not specify how large the effects are or directly demonstrate the predicted long-term consequences for future plant communities and disturbance resilience.
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Soil bacterial networks are less stable under drought than fungal networks — Franciska T. de Vries, Robert Iwan Griffiths, Mark Bailey et al. — Nature Communications — doi:10.1038/s41467-018-05516-7
Abstract licence: CC BY
Explanation generated by Synthesis from the abstract — it is not the original paper.