Publications by authors named "Laura Garcia-Velazquez"

Article Synopsis
  • Global soil biodiversity and functions face threats due to water availability thresholds, which are not well understood.
  • Analyzing data from 383 global sites shows that these thresholds change how climate, vegetation, and soil properties impact soil biodiversity and functions.
  • In areas with less aridity, vegetation and soil properties play a key role, but in more arid regions, climate becomes the main factor influencing soil biodiversity, particularly affecting soil multidiversity more than multifunctionality.
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Soils support an immense portion of Earth's biodiversity and maintain multiple ecosystem functions which are essential for human well-being. Environmental thresholds are known to govern global vegetation patterns, but it is still unknown whether they can be used to predict the distribution of soil organisms and functions across global biomes. Using a global field survey of 383 sites across contrasting climatic and vegetation conditions, here we showed that soil biodiversity and functions exhibited pervasive nonlinear patterns worldwide and are mainly governed by water availability (precipitation and potential evapotranspiration).

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Background: Little is known about the global distribution and environmental drivers of key microbial functional traits such as antibiotic resistance genes (ARGs). Soils are one of Earth's largest reservoirs of ARGs, which are integral for soil microbial competition, and have potential implications for plant and human health. Yet, their diversity and global patterns remain poorly described.

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Article Synopsis
  • Global warming and altered rainfall patterns significantly impact biogeochemical cycles in drylands, especially regarding phosphorus (P) availability and stability.
  • Two long-term experiments in Spain revealed that warming generally increased phosphorus pools in soil, while reduced rainfall did not noticeably affect these pools.
  • Biocrusts were found to enhance phosphorus levels and their presence helped mitigate the effects of warming and rainfall reduction, suggesting that declining biocrust health could worsen climate change impacts on soil nutrients.
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The importance of soil age as an ecosystem driver across biomes remains largely unresolved. By combining a cross-biome global field survey, including data for 32 soil, plant, and microbial properties in 16 soil chronosequences, with a global meta-analysis, we show that soil age is a significant ecosystem driver, but only accounts for a relatively small proportion of the cross-biome variation in multiple ecosystem properties. Parent material, climate, vegetation and topography predict, collectively, 24 times more variation in ecosystem properties than soil age alone.

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The role of soil biodiversity in regulating multiple ecosystem functions is poorly understood, limiting our ability to predict how soil biodiversity loss might affect human wellbeing and ecosystem sustainability. Here, combining a global observational study with an experimental microcosm study, we provide evidence that soil biodiversity (bacteria, fungi, protists and invertebrates) is significantly and positively associated with multiple ecosystem functions. These functions include nutrient cycling, decomposition, plant production, and reduced potential for pathogenicity and belowground biological warfare.

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Unlike plants and vertebrates, the ecological preferences, and potential vulnerabilities of soil invertebrates to environmental change, remain poorly understood in terrestrial ecosystems globally. We conducted a cross-biome survey including 83 locations across six continents to advance our understanding of the ecological preferences and vulnerabilities of the diversity of dominant and functionally important soil invertebrate taxa, including nematodes, arachnids and rotifers. The diversity of invertebrates was analyzed through amplicon sequencing.

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Article Synopsis
  • The study investigates soil priming effects on carbon cycling across 86 different global locations with varied climates and soil types, using C-glucose labeling to measure changes in CO2 release.
  • Findings indicate that higher soil organic carbon (SOC) content is linked to lower positive priming effects, meaning that more carbon is released in drier locations with less SOC.
  • The results highlight the significant role of SOC in regulating these priming effects, which could improve carbon cycling models in the context of global climate change.
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Belowground organisms play critical roles in maintaining multiple ecosystem processes, including plant productivity, decomposition, and nutrient cycling. Despite their importance, however, we have a limited understanding of how and why belowground biodiversity (bacteria, fungi, protists, and invertebrates) may change as soils develop over centuries to millennia (pedogenesis). Moreover, it is unclear whether belowground biodiversity changes during pedogenesis are similar to the patterns observed for aboveground plant diversity.

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