Winter warming rapidly increases carbon degradation capacities of fungal
communities in tundra soil: potential consequences on carbon stability
Abstract
High-latitude tundra ecosystems are increasingly affected by climate
warming. As an important fraction of soil microorganisms, fungi play
essential roles in carbon (C) degradation, especially the old,
chemically recalcitrant C. However, it remains obscure how fungi respond
to climate warming and whether fungi, in turn, affect C stability of
tundra. In a two-year winter soil warming experiment of 2 °C by snow
fences, we investigated responses of fungal communities to warming in
the active layer of the Alaskan tundra. Although fungal community
composition, revealed by 28S rRNA gene amplicon sequencing, remained
unchanged (P > 0.05), fungal functional gene composition,
revealed by a microarray named GeoChip, was altered (P <
0.05). Changes in functional gene composition were linked to winter soil
temperature, thaw depth, soil moisture, and gross primary productivity
(Canonical Correlation Analysis, P < 0.05). Specifically,
relative abundances of fungal genes encoding invertase, xylose
reductase, and vanillin dehydrogenase significantly increased (P
< 0.05), indicating higher C degradation capacities of fungal
communities under warming. Accordingly, we detected changes of fungal
gene networks under warming, including higher average path distance,
lower average clustering coefficient, and lower percentage of negative
links, indicating that warming potentially changed fungal interactions.
Together, our study revealed higher C degradation capacities of fungal
communities under short-term warming and highlights the potential
impacts of fungal communities on mediating tundra ecosystem respiration,
and consequently future C stability of high-latitude tundra.