Abstract
Soils in high northern latitudes store a globally important amount of carbon (C) in the form of organic matter. Understanding the controls of the stability of this C store is crucial for accurate projections of the global C cycle under a warming climate. An important uncertainty in this area is the temperature sensitivity of soil C decomposition by microbial organisms, and the ways in which this is determined by the interaction of microbial ecology and physiology. This project will build on initial observations from a geothermal soil warming gradient in Iceland to investigate the dynamics of how soil microbial communities respond to warming in range of Arctic soils; what the consequences of those changes are for soil C stability as well as other important ecosystem functions; and whether commonalities in soil community responses can be used to develop a microbe-based biodetection system for detecting the emerging responses of soil communities to warming across a range of Arctic soil types. The results of this study will improve our understanding of the mechanistic basis of soil respiration temperature sensitivity in cold-biomes, and can potentially contribute to more accurate representation of microbe-mediated processes in Earth System models.
Netherlands