Insights into the responses of soil microbial community to the environmental disturbances
土壤微生物对环境胁迫的响应机制

Soil is under increasing environmental pressures that can alter its capacity to fulfill essential ecosystem functions. Microorganisms play important roles in material and energy flows of ecosystem. Thus, it is essential to understand how soil microorganisms respond to environmental disturbances. Soil microbial community diversity determined soil ecosystem stability to a great extent. Many studies demonstrated that soil ecosystem would be more stable with higher biodiversity. In this paper, we summarized the recent progress in the responses (resistance and resilience) of soil microbial communities to environmental stresses and the underlying ecological mechanisms. When new microbial community adapted to the stresses, the resistance and resilience of the soil microbial community would be changed accordingly. Meanwhile, resistance and resilience to disturbance might also vary between microbial communities. These variations of soil microbial community depended on not only the resistant microbes and their horizontal resistant genes transfer, which led to the shift in composition and diversity of soil microbial community, but also the composition and functional redundancy of the microbial community. Functional redundancy within a community might act as a buffer against function mutability resulted from the biodiversity loss. Therefore, investigation on the relationship between soil ecosystem stability and microbial diversity would reveal the driving mechanisms of microbial adaption to the environment, and be helpful to provide measures to quantifying soil microbial function and biodiversity.