Microbes' role in soil decomposition: Soils harbor a rich diversity of invertebrate and microbial life, which drives biogeochemical processes from local to global scales. Relating the biodiversity patterns of soil ecological communities to soil biogeochemistry remains an important challenge for ecologists and earth system modelers. Crowther et al. review the state of science relating soil organisms to biogeochemical processes, focusing particularly on the importance of microbial community variation on decomposition and turnover of soil organic matter. Although there is variation in soil communities across the globe, ecologists are beginning to identify general patterns that may contribute to predicting biogeochemical dynamics under future climate change. Science , this issue p. eaav0550

Motivation: Widespread interest in the study of the microbiome has resulted in data proliferation and the development of powerful computational tools. However, many scientific researchers lack the time, training, or infrastructure to work with large datasets or to install and use command line tools. Results: The National Institute of Allergy and Infectious Diseases (NIAID) has created Nephele, a cloud-based microbiome data analysis platform with standardized pipelines and a simple web interface for transforming raw data into biological insights. Nephele integrates common microbiome analysis tools as well as valuable reference datasets like the healthy human subjects cohort of the Human Microbiome Project (HMP). Nephele is built on the Amazon Web Services cloud, which provides centralized and automated storage and compute capacity, thereby reducing the burden on researchers and their institutions. Availability and implementation: https://nephele.niaid.nih.gov and https://github.com/niaid/Nephele

Growing evidence shows that soil microbes affect plant coexistence in a variety of systems. However, since these systems vary in the impacts microbes have on plants and in the ways plants compete with each other, it is challenging to integrate results into a general predictive theory. To this end, we suggest that the concepts of niche and fitness difference from modern coexistence theory should be used to contextualize how soil microbes contribute to plant coexistence. Synthesizing a range of mechanisms under a general plant–soil microbe interaction model, we show that, depending on host specificity, both pathogens and mutualists can affect the niche difference between competing plants. However, we emphasize the need to also consider the effect of soil microbes on plant fitness differences, a role often overlooked when examining their role in plant coexistence. Additionally, since our framework predicts that soil microbes modify the importance of plant–plant competition relative to other factors for determining the outcome of competition, we suggest that experimental work should simultaneously quantify microbial effects and plant competition. Thus, we propose experimental designs that efficiently measure both processes and show how our framework can be applied to identify the underlying drivers of coexistence. Using an empirical case study, we demonstrate that the processes driving coexistence can be counterintuitive, and that our general predictive framework provides a better way to identify the true processes through which soil microbes affect coexistence.

Diurnal temperature range (DTR) is an important indicator for climate change. In this paper, diurnal air temperature range variations of the continental United States over the past one hundred years were investigated to discover the temporal trend and spatial patterns. While the annual mean DTR of the United States has steadily decreased during the past decades, it is found that the decreased amplitude has spatial and seasonal patterns. Seasonal and spatial variations of DTR were analyzed for the four regions, northeastern, northwestern, southeastern, and southwestern. Fall and summer witnessed a significant decrease in DTR in all regions. Spring and winter, on the other hand, have experienced much smaller decreases. Temporal trend and spatial patterns of daily maximum and minimum temperatures were also investigated to gain insight of DTR change

The degree to which elevated CO₂ concentrations (e[CO₂]) increase the amount of carbon (C) assimilated by vegetation plays a key role in climate change. However, due to the short‐term nature of CO₂ enrichment experiments and the lack of reconciliation between different ecological scales, the effect of e[CO₂] on plant biomass stocks remains a major uncertainty in future climate projections. Here, we review the effect of e[CO₂] on plant biomass across multiple levels of ecological organization, scaling from physiological responses to changes in population‐, community‐, ecosystem‐, and global‐scale dynamics. We find that evidence for a sustained biomass response to e[CO₂] varies across ecological scales, leading to diverging conclusions about the responses of individuals, populations, communities, and ecosystems. While the distinct focus of every scale reveals new mechanisms driving biomass accumulation under e[CO₂], none of them provides a full picture of all relevant processes. For example, while physiological evidence suggests a possible long‐term basis for increased biomass accumulation under e[CO₂] through sustained photosynthetic stimulation, population‐scale evidence indicates that a possible e[CO₂]‐induced increase in mortality rates might potentially outweigh the effect of increases in plant growth rates on biomass levels. Evidence at the global scale may indicate that e[CO₂] has contributed to increased biomass cover over recent decades, but due to the difficulty to disentangle the effect of e[CO₂] from a variety of climatic and land‐use‐related drivers of plant biomass stocks, it remains unclear whether nutrient limitations or other ecological mechanisms operating at finer scales will dampen the e[CO₂] effect over time. By exploring these discrepancies, we identify key research gaps in our understanding of the effect of e[CO₂] on plant biomass and highlight the need to integrate knowledge across scales of ecological organization so that large‐scale modeling can represent the finer‐scale mechanisms needed to constrain our understanding of future terrestrial C storage.