Predicting the stability of soil communities and functions under climate change

土壤群落在包括碳、氮循环在内的多种生态系统功能中发挥着重要作用。因此，气候变化下土壤群落组成的不同变化可能会对生态系统服务的提供产生重大影响。然而，我们对不同土壤群落的功能作用、它们抵抗干扰和从干扰中恢复的不同能力以及群落组成的变化如何影响生态系统功能知之甚少。该项目将利用实验来开发一种新的框架，用于预测气候变化下土壤群落和功能的稳定性。该框架通过根据广泛的功能特征描述土壤群落，解释了土壤系统中的高度功能冗余，并将阐明每一组在控制、土壤变暖、干旱和洪水处理中的功能作用。经过检验的中心假设是，土壤群落的功能特征强烈影响土壤群落和生态系统对气候变化相关压力的反应(图1)。这种新的基于过程的对土壤群落和功能之间联系的理解将根据生态学理论的基本原理进行翻译，并整合到一个基于机械论主体的模型(ABM)中。然后，ABM使我们能够确定功能组响应如何塑造生态系统的多功能性，以及与气候变化相关的干扰事件对土壤群落和功能稳定性的交互影响。重要的是，ABM为更好地预测土壤群落和功能之间的相互作用如何推动未来气候变化下的生态系统弹性奠定了基础。

Soil communities play important roles in multiple ecosystem functions, including carbon and nitrogen cycling. Divergent shifts in soil community composition under climate changes could therefore have dramatic consequences for ecosystem service provision. Yet, we know little about the functional role of different soil community groups, their varying abilities to resist and recover from disturbances, and how shifts in community composition influences ecosystem functions. This project will use experiments to develop a novel framework for predicting the stability of soil communities and functions under climate change. The framework accounts for high functional redundancy in soil systems, by characterising soil communities according to broad functional traits, and will elucidate the functional role of each group under control, soil warming, drought, and flood treatments. The central hypothesis tested is that the functional traits of soil community groups strongly influence both soil community and ecosystem function responses to climate change related stressors (Figure 1). This new process-based understanding of the links between soil communities and functions will be translated according to fundamental principles from ecological theory and integrated in a mechanistic agent-based model (ABM). The ABM then allows us to determine how functional group responses shape ecosystem multifunctionality, and the interactive effects of disturbance events related to climate change on the stability of soil communities and functions. Importantly, the ABM forms a basis for better anticipating how the interplay between soil communities and functions drive ecosystem resilience under climate change in the future.