Persistent but variable effect of experimental laboratory burns on microbial community resistance, resilience, and function across contrasting boreal forest soils

Boreal forests stretch across vast swaths of the northern hemisphere, are shaped by wildfire, and play an important role in the global carbon cycle. Microorganisms play a critical role in soil nutrient cycling in these ecosystems, yet there are many open questions about the impacts of wildfire on microbially mediated soil biogeochemical cycles. In this study, we used laboratory burns and soil incubations of intact soil cores collected from two distinct soil types – Histosols and Gleysols – from boreal forest within Wood Buffalo National Park, Alberta, Canada, to assess burn effects on soil bacterial and fungal community composition and function. We compared resistance and resilience to burning for microbial communities vs. resistance and resilience to burning for soil pH and soil respiration to assess the relationships between burn-induced shifts in microbial community composition, the soil environment, and microbial activity. To link shifts in microbial community composition to potential community function, we measured glucose-specific carbon use efficiency (CUE) and assessed its relationship with weighted mean predicted 16S rRNA gene copy numbers for bacterial communities and FUNGuild-estimated relative abundance of putative symbiotrophic and saprotrophic fungi in burned and unburned soils. Microbial community resistance and resilience to burning varied across soil type with higher resistance of both bacterial and fungal communities from Histosols compared to the O horizons of Gleysols. This may be explained by a larger impact of burning on microbes in the thinner Gleysol O horizons. The relatively low resilience of bacterial and fungal communities to burning as well as the failure of resilience to increase with time since burning supports previous reports of post-burn microbial community recovery occurring over years rather than months. Burning caused a decrease in CUE with larger decreases following longer, hotter burns, which correlated with an increase in weighted mean predicted 16S rRNA gene copy number, raising the possibility that copy number could serve as a proxy for post-fire CUE in boreal forest soils, though more research is needed to constrain the effects of environmental conditions, substrates, and time since fire on this relationship. These findings suggest several ways in which burn-induced shifts in microbial community composition reflect altered microbial community function in meaningful ways for soil carbon cycling.