Resistance, resilience, and redundancy in microbial communities

TLDR

Although plant community composition is key for predicting ecosystem process rates under global change, microbial community composition is often ignored in ecosystem modeling, yet changes in microbial composition are linked to changes in ecosystem process rates. The authors review recent experiments to assess microbial community resistance, resilience, or redundancy to four disturbances and propose a framework to incorporate microbial composition into ecosystem process models. They review recent experiments and propose a simple framework to incorporate microbial community composition into ecosystem process models. They find that most microbial groups are sensitive and not immediately resilient to disturbance, that such changes can directly affect ecosystem processes, and that more empirical data on phylogeny, traits, and disturbance responses are needed to predict ecosystem responses to global change.

Abstract

Although it is generally accepted that plant community composition is key for predicting rates of ecosystem processes in the face of global change, microbial community composition is often ignored in ecosystem modeling. To address this issue, we review recent experiments and assess whether microbial community composition is resistant, resilient, or functionally redundant in response to four different disturbances. We find that the composition of most microbial groups is sensitive and not immediately resilient to disturbance, regardless of taxonomic breadth of the group or the type of disturbance. Other studies demonstrate that changes in composition are often associated with changes in ecosystem process rates. Thus, changes in microbial communities due to disturbance may directly affect ecosystem processes. Based on these relationships, we propose a simple framework to incorporate microbial community composition into ecosystem process models. We conclude that this effort would benefit from more empirical data on the links among microbial phylogeny, physiological traits, and disturbance responses. These relationships will determine how readily microbial community composition can be used to predict the responses of ecosystem processes to global change.