What we conclude from this study is the warming has an effect on the soil ecosystem, said Kostas Konstantinidis, an assistant professor who holds the Carlton S. Wilder Chair in Environmental Engineering at the Georgia Institute of Technology. It does appear that the microbes change genetically to take advantage of the opportunity given to them. The study was published online Dec. 27, 2013, in the journal Applied and Environmental Microbiology. The research was sponsored by the Department of Energy, and involved collaboration with several universities, including the University of Oklahoma. The findings are the culmination of a 10-year study that seeks to understand how the most intricate ecosystem in nature -- soil -- will respond to climate change. A single gram of soil is home to a billion bacterial cells, representing at least 4,000 different species. In comparison, the human gut is home to at least 10 times fewer different species of bacteria. Scientists have little idea what microbes in the soil do, how they do it, or how they respond to changes in their environment, Konstantinidis said. This limits the predictive capabilities of climate models. In models of climate change it is a black box what happens to the carbon in soil, Konstantinidis said. One reasons that models of climate change have such big room for variation is because we dont understand the microbial activities that control carbon in the soil. Complicating matters, 99.9 percent of the microbes in the soil cannot be grown in the lab, so scientists must study them where they live. The molecular and genomic techniques to do so are a specialty of the Konstantinidis lab. The researchers traveled to the Kessler Farm Field Laboratory in McClain County, Oklahoma, where they conducted their study on grassland soils, which had been abandoned for agriculture use for more than 20 years. The scientists warmed plots of soil with radiators set a few feet above the ground for 10 consecutive years. They warmed these plots 2 degrees Celsius, which many climate models forecast as the global temperature increase over the next 50 years....
Posted on: Mon, 20 Jan 2014 03:40:27 +0000