Lowland plant arrival in alpine ecosystems facilitates a decrease in soil carbon content under experimental climate warming
Abstract
Climate warming is releasing carbon from soils around the world1-3, constituting a positive climate feedback. Warming is also causing species to expand their ranges into new ecosystems4-9. Yet, in most ecosystems, whether range expanding species will amplify or buffer expected soil carbon loss is unknown10. Here we used two whole-community transplant experiments and a follow-up glasshouse experiment to determine whether the establishment of herbaceous lowland plants in alpine ecosystems influences soil carbon content under warming. We found that warming (transplantation to low elevation) led to a negligible decrease in alpine soil carbon content, but its effects became significant and 52% ± 31% (mean ± 95% CIs) larger after lowland plants were introduced at low density into the ecosystem. We present evidence that decreases in soil carbon content likely occurred via lowland plants increasing rates of root exudation, soil microbial respiration and CO2 release under warming. Our findings suggest that warming-induced range expansions of herbaceous plants have the potential to alter climate feedbacks from this system, and that plant range expansions among herbaceous communities may be an overlooked mediator of warming effects on carbon dynamics.
Data availability
Data Availability: All data contributing to the findings of this study have been deposited in the OSF under the DOI 10.17605/OSF.IO/S54CH. All R scripts necessary to reproduce the findings of this study are available in the github repository tom-n-walker/uphill-plants-soil-carbon.
Article and author information
Author details
Funding
European Union Horizon 2020 (678841)
- Jake Alexander
Swiss National Science Foundation (31003A-176044)
- Tom WN Walker
- Jake Alexander
Swiss National Science Foundation (PZ00P2-174047)
- Konstantin Gavazov
Swiss National Science Foundation (31003A-173210)
- Sebastián Block
French National Research Agency (ANR-20-CE02-0021)
- Tamara Münkemüller
The funders had no role in study design, data collection and interpretation, or the decision to submit the work for publication.
Copyright
© 2022, Walker et al.
This article is distributed under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution License permitting unrestricted use and redistribution provided that the original author and source are credited.
Metrics
-
- 1,144
- views
-
- 312
- downloads
-
- 9
- citations
Views, downloads and citations are aggregated across all versions of this paper published by eLife.
Download links
Downloads (link to download the article as PDF)
Open citations (links to open the citations from this article in various online reference manager services)
Cite this article (links to download the citations from this article in formats compatible with various reference manager tools)
Further reading
-
- Ecology
- Evolutionary Biology
Understanding the origins of novel, complex phenotypes is a major goal in evolutionary biology. Poison frogs of the family Dendrobatidae have evolved the novel ability to acquire alkaloids from their diet for chemical defense at least three times. However, taxon sampling for alkaloids has been biased towards colorful species, without similar attention paid to inconspicuous ones that are often assumed to be undefended. As a result, our understanding of how chemical defense evolved in this group is incomplete. Here, we provide new data showing that, in contrast to previous studies, species from each undefended poison frog clade have measurable yet low amounts of alkaloids. We confirm that undefended dendrobatids regularly consume mites and ants, which are known sources of alkaloids. Thus, our data suggest that diet is insufficient to explain the defended phenotype. Our data support the existence of a phenotypic intermediate between toxin consumption and sequestration — passive accumulation — that differs from sequestration in that it involves no derived forms of transport and storage mechanisms yet results in low levels of toxin accumulation. We discuss the concept of passive accumulation and its potential role in the origin of chemical defenses in poison frogs and other toxin-sequestering organisms. In light of ideas from pharmacokinetics, we incorporate new and old data from poison frogs into an evolutionary model that could help explain the origins of acquired chemical defenses in animals and provide insight into the molecular processes that govern the fate of ingested toxins.
-
- Ecology
Tracking wild pigs with GPS devices reveals how their social interactions could influence the spread of disease, offering new strategies for protecting agriculture, wildlife, and human health.