Environmental change legacies attenuate disturbance response of desert soil microbiome and multifunctionality

Abstract

Abstract Deserts are predicted to be one of the ecosystems most vulnerable to global climate change, with dramatic fluctuations of temperature and water, even over the span of a single day. These previous disturbances could influence the response of the soil microbiome and its functions to subsequent disturbances, which is known as legacy effect. However, how legacy effects shape the response of soil microbiome and its functions to environmental fluctuations (e.g. temperature and water availability) in desert ecosystems remains to be investigated. Here, we firstly exposed desert soils to drought, freezing or their combination, and then followed by a second disturbance, resulting in a temporally full factorial treatment. We found that environmental change legacies affected the response of soil multifunctionality, microbial abundance and richness to second drought and freezing, except for eukaryotic richness. Initial disturbances caused legacy effects on microbial composition and weakened their responses to later disturbances, and these effects were stronger for prokaryotes than eukaryotes. The attenuated response to later disturbances is largely due to that almost half of the taxa affected by the earlier disturbances were also affected by the second disturbances. The phylogenetic depth of these responses varied minimally among the types of disturbances but were more conserved for negative responses, indicating a result of historical adaptation. Moreover, the altered community composition was associated with functional changes in the disturbed soils. These findings will improve our understanding of the mechanisms underlying the legacy impacts of multiple environmental disturbances on desert microbial communities and strengthen our ability to develop management strategies for protection prior to disturbance events. Read the free Plain Language Summary for this article on the Journal blog.