Discipline: Ecology Environmental and Earth Sciences
Subcategory: Climate Change
Session: 2
Room: Exhibit Hall A
Karina M. Cortijo-Robles - University of Puerto Rico Rio Piedras Campus
Co-Author(s): Meredith A. Zettlemoyer, W.K. Kellogg Biological Station, Michigan State University, MI
Climate Change May Affect Extinctions Via Altered Plant-Soil Feedbacks Karina M. Cortijo-Robles, University of Puerto Rio Piedras Campus Co-Author(s): Meredith A. Zettlemoyer, W.K. Kellogg Biological Station, Michigan State University, MI Climate change is among the leading causes of biodiversity loss and is predicted to result in the extinction of an additional 5.2-15.7% of all plant and animal species by 2100. Climate change will likely cause shifts in species interactions that might impact plant population declines. One such interaction is between plants and their associated soil organisms (hereafter “plant-soil feedbacks” or “PSFs”), which may contribute to coexistence, species success, and plant abundance in natural communities. Plant-soil feedbacks occur when plant species influence the composition of microbes in the plant rhizosphere, which in turn impacts the growth of the plant species. Reduced survival and growth in a species’ own soil suggests a negative feedback, likely via accumulation of pathogens and other belowground enemies. Species experiencing positive PSFs might accumulate enemies more slowly or benefit from increased decomposition or interactions with symbionts such as mycorrhizal fungi. For example, rare and native plants’ often experience more negative PSFs than common and invasive species: rare and native plants’ growth decreases in their own soil, likely due to accumulation of pathogens. However, we know little about PSFs under climate change or their role in plant extinction events, in part because we lack empirical tests of PSFs in the context of climate change. We used historical data from 60-80-year-old botanical surveys combined with experimental and greenhouse experiments to investigate the combined effects of plant-soil feedbacks and climate warming on population declines. Using an experimental warming array, we compared the strength of plant-soil feedbacks in 4 pairs of locally extinct and extant prairie species when they are grown in soil collected from ambient and warmed (+3°C) experimental plots in a simulated global warming array. We hypothesized that PSFs would be more negative under warmed temperatures for locally extinct species than extant species due to the accumulation of belowground enemies. We found that extinct species tend to demonstrate lower growth in warmed soil than in ambient soil, while extant species’ growth did not shift between ambient and warmed soil (status x soil temperature Χ2=3.26, p=0.07). This suggests that plant performance is affected by temperature-mediated shifts in microbial communities. In the future, we will measure biomass to look at shifts in PSFs between ambient vs. warmed soils and extant vs. extinct species. Given growth responses, we expect that extinct species will demonstrate more negative PSFs in warmed soils, possibly due to accumulation of belowground enemies. This study will help to inform predictions of future extinction risk of threatened species and improve our understanding of PSFs under climate change. References: 1. Bever, J. 1994. Ecology 75: 1965-1977. 2. Klironomos, J. 2002. Feedback with soil biota contributes to plant rarity and invasiveness in communities. Nature 417: 67-70. 3. Urban, M.C. 2015. Science 348: 571-573. 4. van der Putten, W. et al. 2016. Funct. Ecol. 30: 1109-1121. 5. Zettlemoyer, M. et al. (2019). AJB 106: 1-13. Funder Acknowledgments(s): We thank the National Science Foundation (NSF), the Ecological Society of America’s SEEDS program (ESA SEEDS), and the W. K. Kellogg Biological Station for their funding and logistical support. Faculty Advisor/Mentor: Meredith Zettlemoyer, zettlem2@msu.edu; Jennifer Lau, jenlau@iu.edu
Funder Acknowledgement(s): We thank the following funders for their funding and logistical support: National Science Foundation (NSF); The Ecological Society of America?s SEEDS program (ESA SEEDS); W. K. Kellogg Biological Station
Faculty Advisor: Jennifer A. Lau, jenlau@iu.edu
Role: I was capable of writing the introduction, hypothesis, and significance of the proposal. In the methods, I autoclaved the sand, collected the soil form the warmed plots and prepared the plots with the seedlings of each one of the species in the greenhouse. I collected the data of the height of the seedlings after 10 weeks. I participated in the data analysis and in the making of the poster. In the final stage of the research I was capable of writing an abstract.