Soil aeration rather than methanotrophic community drives methane uptake under drought in a subtropical forest.

Little information is available about the effects of drought on soil methane (CH) uptake and the underlying feedback of the soil microbial community in forest biomes. More importantly, a meta-analysis of the current literature on this topic revealed that there are virtually no data available in subtropical forests. To fill the abovementioned knowledge gap, we carried out a 3-year investigation of in situ CH efflux under drought in a subtropical forest, and found that drought significantly increased soil CH uptake (P < 0.