The aim of our talk will be to show an overview of the results obtained within the framework of SECASOL project. The central hypotheses of these project was that both direct effects (increasing summer droughts) and indirect effects (climate-change driven changes in forest structure and composition) of climate change in the Mediterranean basin would strongly affect microbial community ecology and functioning, and consequently affecting C cycles in these ecosystems. More in detail, activities within this project were:

(1) To investigate possible effects of climate -change driven secondary succession on soil bacterial/fungal taxonomic composition as well as soil C dynamics in ecotonal forest.

(2) To investigate possible effects of long-term droughts (10 years) on both structure and functioning (SOM decomposition) of soil microbial communities

(3) To investigate the effects of secondary succession and drought on soil respiration and its different biological soil compartments (autotrophic, symbiotic and heterotrophic).

 
We applied a very interdisciplinary approach for these purposes, combining state-of-the-art molecular methodologies (DNA pyrosequencing), 13C solid-state Nuclear Magnetic Resonance (CP-MAS 13C NMR) to investigate changes in SOM composition, different techniques to study soil respiration (soda lime, IRGA and solid-state open path sensors) and methods to partition flux in its main biological compartments. Besides the observed high functional redundancy and resilience of soil microbial communities, our results points to mechanisms of plant-soil interactions as main controllers of soil C dynamics.

Producción y edición: Mediateca MNCN-CSIC.
Presentación: Dr. F. Valladares, Prof. de Investigación. Dpto. Biogeografía y Cambio Global, MNCN-CSIC.
Ponente: Dr. Jorge Curiel Yuste. Contratado Ramón y Cajal. Dpto. Biogeografía y Cambio Global, MNCN-CSIC.

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