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Global Climate Change & Its Link to Soil Organisms
GLOBAL CLIMATE CHANGE & ITS LINK TO SOIL ORGANISMS
When people think of the consequences of global warming, most jump to the melting ice caps and death of beloved polar bears. We know that as our Earth undergoes climate change, it’s adversely affecting the ecological balance in complex ways. For the first time, however, a study done at the University of California Berkley, has linked climate change to the downfall of microbial species that are considered essential to ecological systems. Previous studies have identified the use of chemicals as harmful for soil organisms, insects, and birds, but never has climate change been pinpointed as a threat to these species.
The study states that “models predict that up to 30% of parasitic worms are committed to extinction, driven by a combination of direct and indirect pressures.” With this, species that are adapting to the climate change will allow them to “invade and replace” native organisms resulting in unpredictable, but most likely negative consequences.
Dr. Colin Carlson is the lead author of the study and estimates that we will see a huge extinction rate within the soil organisms as time and climate change continues. He blames this effect on the loss of habitat and the implications of trying to coexist. The end result of this could be detrimental to the human species, requiring lively soil to live.
Carlson explains that the effect of climate change on soil organisms has gone unnoticed for so long because our research focuses on the impact of the change on animals like vertebrates. Most people see microbial organisms as pests, rather than a crucial part of the ecological system. Since the modernization of agriculture, we have seen soil as a medium for holding plants, as Jenny Hopkins, author of “Can American Soil Be Brought Back To Life”, likes to put it.
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Is Climate Change Putting World’s Microbiomes at Risk?
Is Climate Change Putting World’s Microbiomes at Risk?
Researchers are only beginning to understand the complexities of the microbes in the earth’s soil and the role they play in fostering healthy ecosystems. Now, climate change is threatening to disrupt these microbes and the key functions they provide.
In 1994, scientists at the Pacific Northwest National Laboratory moved soil from moist, high-altitude sites to warmer and drier places lower in altitude, and vice versa. In 2011, they returned to the sites and looked again at the soil microbes and found that they had done little to adapt functionally to their new home. That’s a bad sign, experts say, for a world convulsed by a changing climate.
“These microbes have somehow lost the capacity to adapt to the new conditions,” said Vanessa Bailey, one of the authors of the study, published this month in PLOS One. That not what scientists anticipated, and it “calls into question the resilience of the overall environment to climate change,” she said. “Soil is the major buffer for environmental changes, and the microbial community is the basis for that resilience.”
As snow and ice melt, it’s fairly straightforward to grasp what climate change means for the future of, say, polar bears in the Arctic or penguins in Antarctica. But it’s far more difficult to understand what is happening to the planetary microbiome in the earth’s crust and water, a quadrillion quadrillion microorganisms, according to Scientific American. Yet it is far more important, for microbes run the world. They are key players that perpetuate life on the planet, provide numerous ecosystem services, and serve as a major bulwark against environmental changes.
Researchers say that as the planet warms, essential diversity and function in the microbial world could be lost.
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