Global negative effects of nitrogen deposition on soil microbes
Open accessAbstract
Soil microbes comprise a large portion of the genetic diversity on Earth and influence a large number of important ecosystem processes. Increasing atmospheric nitrogen (N) deposition represents a major global change driver; however, it is still debated whether the impacts of N deposition on soil microbial biomass and respiration are ecosystem-type dependent. Moreover, the extent of N deposition impacts on microbial composition remains unclear. Here we conduct a global meta-analysis using 1408 paired observations from 151 studies to evaluate the responses of soil microbial biomass, composition, and function to N addition. We show that nitrogen addition reduced total microbial biomass, bacterial biomass, fungal biomass, biomass carbon, and microbial respiration. Importantly, these negative effects increased with N application rate and experimental duration. Nitrogen addition reduced the fungi to bacteria ratio and the relative abundances of arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi and gram-negative bacteria and increased gram-positive bacteria. Our structural equation modeling showed that the negative effects of N application on soil microbial abundance and composition led to reduced microbial respiration. The effects of N addition were consistent across global terrestrial ecosystems. Our results suggest that atmospheric N deposition negatively affects soil microbial growth, composition, and function across all terrestrial ecosystems, with more pronounced effects with increasing N deposition rate and duration.
Integrity signals
Registry
Cites
Statistics
Claims the paper makes
Claims other papers make about this one
Each is checked against this paper’s own text: does it say what the citing paper says it does?
Nitrogen fertilization can have negative impact on fungal development.
“At the same time, nitrogen fertilization can have negative impact on fungal development (Treseder, 2008;Zhang et al., 2018).”
From The hidden potential of saprotrophic fungi in arable soil: Patterns of short-term stimulation by organic amendments (2020) · cites this paper as Zhang et al., 2018
Elevated or prolonged nitrogen fertilization can have a negative impact on fungal biomass and especially affects lignin-degraders.
“At the same time, elevated or prolonged nitrogen fertilization can have a negative impact on fungal biomass (Zhang et al., 2018) and especially affects lignin-degraders (Entwistle et al., 2018).”
From The hidden potential of saprotrophic fungi in arable soil: Patterns of short-term stimulation by organic amendments (2020) · cites this paper as Zhang et al., 2018
Cites
Pseudoreplication and the Design of Ecological Field Experiments
Hurlbert, S. H. (1984) · Ecological Monographs · doi:10.2307/1942661 · Cited by 8,377 · see citing works
Power failure: why small sample size undermines the reliability of neuroscience
Button, K. S., Ioannidis, J. P. A., Mokrysz, C., Nosek, B. A., Flint, J., Robinson, E. S. J., & Munafò, M. R. (2013) · Nature Reviews Neuroscience · doi:10.1038/nrn3475 · Cited by 7,641 · cited 2× · see citing works
“power [39], but few have explicitly tested whether ecological responses are statistically significant among ecosystem types.”
BackgroundProkaryotes: The unseen majority
Whitman, W. B., Coleman, D. C., & Wiebe, W. J. (1998) · Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences · doi:10.1073/pnas.95.12.6578 · Cited by 4,871 · see citing works
The meta-analysis of response ratios in experimental ecology
Hedges, L. V., Gurevitch, J., & Curtis, P. S. (1999) · Ecology · doi:10.1890/0012-9658(1999)080[1150:tmaorr]2.0.co;2 · Cited by 4,704 · see citing works
Microbial diversity drives multifunctionality in terrestrial ecosystems
Delgado-Baquerizo, M., Maestre, F. T., Reich, P. B., Jeffries, T. C., Gaitan, J. J., Encinar, D., Berdugo, M., Campbell, C. D., & Singh, B. K. (2016) · Nature Communications · doi:10.1038/ncomms10541 · Cited by 2,624 · see citing works
Productivity limits and potentials of the principles of conservation agriculture
Pittelkow, C. M., Liang, X., Linquist, B. A., van Groenigen, K. J., Lee, J., Lundy, M. E., van Gestel, N., Six, J., Venterea, R. T., & van Kessel, C. (2015) · Nature · doi:10.1038/nature13809 · Cited by 1,688 · see citing works
Flagged first, then by citations
Cited by
Sorted by citations
Pokharel, P., Ma, Z., & Chang, S. X. (2020) · Biochar · doi:10.1007/s42773-020-00039-1 · Cited by 390 · see citing works
Penuelas, J., Janssens, I. A., Ciais, P., Obersteiner, M., & Sardans, J. (2020) · Global Change Biology · doi:10.1111/gcb.14981 · Cited by 318 · see citing works
Chen, H., Dai, Z., Veach, A. M., Zheng, J., Xu, J., & Schadt, C. W. (2020) · Agriculture, Ecosystems & Environment · doi:10.1016/j.agee.2020.106841 · Cited by 158 · see citing works
Self-citationClocchiatti, A., Hannula, S. E., van den Berg, M., Korthals, G., & de Boer, W. (2020) · Applied Soil Ecology · doi:10.1016/j.apsoil.2019.103434 · Cited by 147 · see citing works
Chen, M., Chang, L., Zhang, J., Guo, F., Vymazal, J., He, Q., & Chen, Y. (2020) · Environmental Science and Ecotechnology · doi:10.1016/j.ese.2020.100063 · Cited by 143 · see citing works
Regional biogeography versus intra-annual dynamics of the root and soil microbiome
Bell-Dereske, L. P., Benucci, G. M. N., da Costa, P. B., Bonito, G., Friesen, M. L., Tiemann, L. K., & Evans, S. E. (2023) · Environmental Microbiome · doi:10.1186/s40793-023-00504-x · Cited by 14 · see citing works
- Authors
- Zhang, T., Chen, H. Y. H., & Ruan, H.
- Affiliations
- Nanjing Forestry University (CN)
- Lakehead University (CA)
- Corresponding author
- Chen, Han Y H
- Ruan, Honghua
- Venue
- The ISME Journal
- Publisher
- Oxford University Press (OUP)
- Published
- 2018-03-27
- Volume
- 12
- Issue
- 7
- Pages
- 1817-1825
- ISSN
- 1751-7362 (ISSN-L)
- 1751-7370
- PMC
- PMC6018792
- OpenAlex
- W2794529768
- Cited by
- 707
- References
- 6
- Citations by year
- 2026: 88 · 2025: 108 · 2024: 98 · 2023: 107 · 2022: 100 · 2021: 93 · 2020: 62 · 2019: 40 · 2018: 9
- FWCI
- 47.94
- Type
- journal article
- Language
- en
- Open access
- bronze
- doi.org
- Locations
- The ISME Journal (publishedVersion)
- PubMed Central (publishedVersion)
- PubMed (publishedVersion)
- Funders
- Nanjing Forestry University
- Government of Jiangsu Province
- Priority Academic Program Development of Jiangsu Higher Education Institutions
- Doctorate Fellowship Foundation of Nanjing Forestry University
- Chinese Government Scholarship
- National Key Research and Development Program of China (No. 2016YFD0600204, 2016YFD0600204)
- Topics
- Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Soil Science › Soil Carbon and Nitrogen Dynamics
- Life Sciences › Agricultural and Biological Sciences › Plant Science › Mycorrhizal Fungi and Plant Interactions
- Physical Sciences › Environmental Science › Ecology › Microbial Community Ecology and Physiology
- Keywords
- nitrogen deposition, soil microbes, microbial biomass, microbial respiration, soil microbial community composition, fungal to bacterial ratio, arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi, Gram-negative bacteria, Gram-positive bacteria, terrestrial ecosystems, global change
- MeSH terms
- Bacteria, Carbon, Nitrogen, Soil, Soil Microbiology, Ecosystem, Biomass, Mycorrhizae
About these checks
Registry, retraction, Cites and statistics results are computed, not judged, with one exception: a printed reference that no index lists is read once by a model before it counts as a citation error. Claims are extracted by a model and kept only when their quote appears verbatim in the text; each cited source is then checked, with a model’s help, for whether it says what the claim relies on. Those verdicts can be wrong — read the claim’s quote and the cited source before relying on one.
Statistics and arithmetic are recomputed, not judged.
Confidence bands are shown only for fields calibrated on our annotated test set. None is calibrated yet, so no band is shown.
What counts as a claim ›How we measure confidence ›How we check this ›
Are you an author, or do you see a problem with this page? Request a review
