% IMPORTANT: The following is UTF-8 encoded. This means that in the presence
% of non-ASCII characters, it will not work with BibTeX 0.99 or older.
% Instead, you should use an up-to-date BibTeX implementation like “bibtex8” or
% “biber”.
@ARTICLE{Jones:844639,
author = {Jones, Davey L. and Olivera-Ardid, Sara and Klumpp, Erwin
and Knief, Claudia and Hill, Paul W. and Lehndorff, Eva and
Bol, Roland},
title = {{M}oisture activation and carbon use efficiency of soil
microbial communities along an aridity gradient in the
{A}tacama {D}esert},
journal = {Soil biology $\&$ biochemistry},
volume = {117},
issn = {0038-0717},
address = {Amsterdam [u.a.]},
publisher = {Elsevier Science},
reportid = {FZJ-2018-02034},
pages = {68 - 71},
year = {2018},
abstract = {Due to their extreme aridity, high rate of UV irradiation
and low soil carbon (C) content, the soils of the Atacama
Desert represent one of the world's most hostile
environments for microbial life and its survival. Although
infrequent, climatic conditions may, however, prevail which
temporarily remove these stresses and allow life to briefly
flourish. In this study we investigated the response of soil
microbial communities to water and C availability across an
aridity gradient (semi-arid, arid, hyper-arid) within the
Atacama Desert. We simulated the impact of hyper-dry spells,
humid fogs and precipitation events on the activation of the
microbial community and the subsequent mineralization of low
(glucose) and high (plant residues) molecular weight C
substrates. Our results showed that mineralization rate
followed the trend: semi-arid > arid > hyper-arid. Some
glucose mineralization was apparent under hyper-arid
conditions (water activity, aw = 0.05), although this was
10-fold slower than under humid conditions and ca. 200-fold
slower than under wet conditions. A lag phase in CO2
production after glucose-C addition in the hyper-arid soils
suggested that mineralization was limited by the low
microbial biomass in these soils. No lag phase was apparent
in the corresponding semi-arid or arid soils. In contrast,
the breakdown of the plant residues was initially much
slower than for glucose and involved a much longer lag phase
in all soils, suggesting that mineralization was limited by
low exoenzyme activity, particularly in the humid and
hyper-dry soils. Our results also showed that microbial C
use efficiency followed the trend: hyper-arid > arid >
semi-arid. In conclusion, we have shown that even under
hyper-arid conditions, very low levels of microbial activity
and C turnover do occur. Further, the microbial communities
are capable of rapidly responding to available C once water
becomes more abundant, however, this response is both
biomass and metabolically limited in hyper-arid soils.},
cin = {IBG-3},
ddc = {570},
cid = {I:(DE-Juel1)IBG-3-20101118},
pnm = {255 - Terrestrial Systems: From Observation to Prediction
(POF3-255)},
pid = {G:(DE-HGF)POF3-255},
typ = {PUB:(DE-HGF)16},
UT = {WOS:000424957100008},
doi = {10.1016/j.soilbio.2017.10.026},
url = {https://juser.fz-juelich.de/record/844639},
}