Soil microbiome feedback to climate change and options for mitigation

Microbes are a critical component of soil ecosystems, performing crucial functions in biogeochemical cycling, carbon sequestration, and plant health. However, it remains uncertain how their community structure, functioning, and resultant nutrient cycling, including net GHG fluxes, would respond to climate change at different scales. Here, we review global and regional climate change effects on soil microbial community structure and functioning, as well as the climate-microbe feedback and plant-microbe interactions. We also synthesize recent studies on climate change impacts on terrestrial nutrient cycles and GHG fluxes across different climate-sensitive ecosystems. It is generally assumed that climate change factors (e.g., elevated CO2 and temperature) will have varying impacts on the microbial community structure (e.g., fungi-to-bacteria ratio) and their contribution toward nutrient turnover, with potential interactions that may either enhance or mitigate each other's effects. Such climate change responses, however, are difficult to generalize, even within an ecosystem, since they are subjected to not only a strong regional influence of current ambient environmental and edaphic conditions, historical exposure to fluctuations, and time horizon but also to methodological choices (e.g., network construction). Finally, the potential of chemical intrusions and emerging tools, such as genetically engineered plants and microbes, as mitigation strategies against global change impacts, particularly for agroecosystems, is presented. In a rapidly evolving field, this review identifies the knowledge gaps complicating assessments and predictions of microbial climate responses and hindering the development of effective mitigation strategies.