Although cycles of drought are common in the Southwestern United States, climate change has made these droughts more frequent and more severe. Understanding how soil organisms, fungi in particular, are coping with those changes is important because fungi are major decomposers. Alteration in their normal functioning can have cascading repercussions for the functioning of natural ecosystems. To understand how fungi respond to climate change, researchers at University of California, Irvine, led by Dr. Charlotte Alster tested for shifts among key fungal traits–growth, resource acquisition, and stress tolerance–at different levels of water availability.
Their findings, published in Frontiers in Microbiology, showed that fungal traits are very resilient to changes in climate since no compensation for drought stress was needed to maintain rates growth or decomposition. “Surprisingly, we did not find evidence for such trade-offs. These results suggest that drought stress may not change fungal decomposer ability in Southern California” said Alster, currently a Research Fellow at the University of Waikato. According to Alster, “Our study contrasts the newly proposed growth Yield, resource Acquisition, Stress tolerance (“YAS”) framework which posits that evolutionary and physiological trade-offs among traits would elicit negative relationships between these traits”. This study has important implications for impacts of climate change on the functioning of iconic Southwestern ecosystems in the US.
Funding: This study was funded by Grants from NSF (DEB 1912525) and the Department of Energy Office of Biological and Environmental Research (DE-SC0016410).