The impacts of environmental change on plant and microbial communities: A turf transplant experiment in the Colorado Rocky Mountains

Abstract

Climate change is altering both above-ground plant communities and below-ground microbial assemblages, yet their simultaneous responses to altered climate remain poorly understood. To address this, we conducted a whole-community transplant experiment across a 400-meter elevation gradient in the Colorado Rocky Mountains, examining how plant and soil fungal and bacterial/archaeal communities respond to experimental warming and cooling. Transplantation to warmer sites led to rapid, directional shifts of all groups, with compositions changing to resemble those at lower, warmer sites, and diverging from higher origin sites. Soil bacteria and archaea responded most strongly, followed by fungi and then plants, indicating W differing sensitivities. Variation in responses may lead to novel communities, potentially disrupting relationships that affect ecosystem resilience. In contrast, transplantation to cooler IE sites led to weaker, slower, and more variable responses, with limited evidence of community turnover. This indicates that low elevation species may successfully establish upslope if dispersal EV barriers are overcome, potentially increasing the vulnerability of high elevation communities to novel competitors. PR

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