Numerous studies have investigated microbial adaptation to increasing soil temperature, but limitations in experimental design hinder comprehensive understanding. These include short‐term laboratory studies with constant environmental conditions and field studies with few distinct temperature treatments. Here, we utilized a long‐term natural soil geothermal gradient in Aotearoa, New Zealand, ranging in mean annual soil tempera...

Climate warming can reduce global soil carbon stocks by enhancing microbial decomposition. However, the magnitude of this loss remains uncertain because the temperature sensitivity of the decomposition of the major fraction of soil carbon, namely resistant carbon, is not fully known. It is now believed that the resistance of soil carbon mostly depends on microbial accessibility of soil carbon with physical protection being the...

In 2020, the Australian and New Zealand flux research and monitoring network, OzFlux, celebrated its 20 th anniversary by reflecting on the lessons learned through two decades of ecosystem studies on global change biology. OzFlux is a network not only for ecosystem researchers, but also for those ‘next users’ of the knowledge, information and data that such networks provide. Here, we focus on eight lessons across topics of cli...

Climate warming may be exacerbated if rising temperatures stimulate losses of soil carbon to the atmosphere. The direction and magnitude of this carbon‐climate feedback are uncertain, largely due to lack of knowledge of the thermal adaptation of the physiology and composition of soil microbial communities. Here, we applied the macromolecular rate theory (MMRT) to describe the temperature response of the microbial decomposition...

Lakes are ‘hotspots’ for greenhouse gas (GHG) emissions, primarily carbon dioxide (CO 2 ) and methane (CH 4 ). Understanding the processes regulating GHG emissions from lakes, and their temporal variability, is essential for more accurately quantifying the role of lakes in global GHG cycles. In this study, we identified the processes that affect CO 2 and CH 4 concentrations in a small (0.3 km 2 ) eutrophic monomictic lake (Oka...

Summary Forest‐to‐pasture conversion is known to cause global losses in plant and animal diversity, yet impacts of livestock management after such conversion on vital microbial communities in adjoining natural ecosystems remain poorly understood. We examined how pastoral land management practices impact soil microorganisms in adjacent native forest fragments, by comparing bacterial communities sampled along 21 transects bisect...

There is growing international interest in better managing soils to increase soil organic carbon (SOC) content to contribute to climate change mitigation, to enhance resilience to climate change and to underpin food security, through initiatives such as international ‘4p1000’ initiative and the FAO's Global assessment of SOC sequestration potential (GSOCseq) programme. Since SOC content of soils cannot be easily measured, a ke...

Temperature is a crucial factor in determining the rates of ecosystem processes, for example, leaf respiration ( R ) – the flux of plant respired CO 2 from leaves to the atmosphere. Generally, R increases exponentially with temperature and formulations such as the Arrhenius equation are widely used in earth system models. However, experimental observations have shown a consequential and consistent departure from an exponential...