Climate change could impact vital functions o...( BOSTON MA -- June 3 2008 -- Global clim...),Health

BOSTON, MA -- June 3, 2008 -- Global climate change will not only impact plants and animals but will also affect bacteria, fungi and other microbial populations that perform a myriad of functions important to life on earth. It is not entirely certain what those effects will be, but they could be significant and will probably not be good, say researchers today at a scientific meeting in Boston.

Microbes perform a number of critical functions for ecosystems around the world and we are only starting to understand the impact that global change is having on them, says Kathleen Treseder of the University of California, Irvine, at the 108th General Meeting of the American Society for Microbiology.

Treseder studied the effect of rising temperatures and fungi on carbon stores in Alaskan boreal forests, one area of the globe that is experiencing greater warming than others.

There is a lot of frozen dead material under the snowpack. There is as much carbon trapped in the soil of northern ecosystems as there is carbon in the atmosphere. It is a big unknown what is going to happen if these environments heat up, says Treseder.

She started her research with the hypothesis that an increase in temperatures would lead to increased decomposition by fungi. Since one by-product of decomposition is carbon dioxide, rising temperatures should result in greater carbon dioxide release from the soil. What she found was that nitrogen levels in the soil increased as temperatures rose, and nitrogen tends to suppress fungal decomposition rates.

In reality as temperatures increase we tend to see greater nitrogen availability in the soil. Nitrogen suppresses activity and diversity. What we end up seeing is less carbon dioxide production from fungi as temperatures increase in northern ecosystems, says Treseder.

Rising temperatures are also having an effect on snowpack and glaciers and that could be detrimental to the communities
'/>"/>