15 years of sampling soil
In order to investigate the effect of warming on microbial communities, a team of NAU researchers transplanted cylinders of soil from high elevation forests north of Flagstaff to lower, warmer meadows to simulate climate warming, using others at the highest elevation as controls. Over the course of 15 years, the lower-elevation transplants were watered to match higher precipitation of their original climate, and researchers removed samples of the soil at regular intervals. After more than a decade of studying these samples, the results are finally in: warming slows microbe growth.
|