Building soil resilience to future drought and extreme weather by microbial management

We will investigate how microbial resistance and resilience to extreme weather can adapt to climate change, focusing on predicted drought, and its consequences for the land-atmosphere carbon (C) balance and soil fertility. We will determine how land-use, soil structure, and plant-C input affect microbial drought responses.

A network of field experiments will be superimposed on a well-described national climatic gradient, using a “space-for-time substitution” to simulate future climates.

Ecological insights will be used to build a state-of-the-art mechanistic representation in LPJ-GUESS and the Earth system model EC-Earth.We will define how climate shapes (a) the direct dependence of microbial processes on moisture (“resistance”) and (b) the microbial resilience to extreme weather, distinguishing between soil gains and losses of C and nutrientsAlong the climate gradient, we will assess how (a) land-use and plant functional types, (b) resource availability (plant-C), and (c) soil structure regulate microbial resistance and resilience to droughtThe microbial and biogeochemical information generated (1-2) will be distilled into a mechanistic representation and incorporated into (a) conceptual models and (b) a global cycling modelUltimately, we will evaluate the influence of extreme weather on C and nutrient cycles and the feedback to climate change and soil fertility.