Abstract
Climate change is exacerbating tree mortality worldwide, threatening the stability of forest soil organic carbon (SOC) stocks. However, how SOC responds to tree mortality amid co-occurring disturbances remains mechanistically unresolved. Here, we demonstrate that topography spatially decouples the canopy-opening and detrital-legacy effects of tree mortality and transforms these co-occurring disturbances into distinct selective pressures on soil microbial communities, thereby driving SOC toward contrasting fates through divergent microbial strategies for carbon and energy acquisition. On ridges, canopy-opening effects co-select for exo-enzyme and aerobic-respiration traits, alongside SOC loss associated with reduced heavy-fraction organic carbon. In valleys, detrital-legacy effects promote light-fraction-associated SOC gain while co-enriching endo-enzyme and anaerobic-respiration traits, potentially strengthening SOC retention. By integrating amplicon sequencing with genome-informed functional traits, our study provides genomic evidence for the microbial mechanisms underlying divergent SOC responses to tree mortality and highlights the potential of genome-based microbial traits for predicting ecosystem-scale biogeochemical processes.
Acknowledgements
We are grateful to all researchers who contributed to this study, and to the Chinese Forest Biodiversity Monitoring Network (CForBio) for facilitating long-term forest biodiversity monitoring and plot-based research.
Funding
This work was supported by the National Natural Science Foundation of China-Guangdong Joint Fund (U23A20156) and the National Natural Science Foundation of China (32571866).
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Zhang, D., Wang, Z., Zheng, Y. et al. Topographic decoupling of tree-mortality disturbances drives contrasting soil carbon fates via divergent microbial strategies.
Nat Commun (2026). https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-77237-1
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1038/s41467-026-77237-1
Source: Ecology - nature.com
