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Soils from different landscape elements diverge in response to multiple global change factors
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Scientists tested how farmland, grassland, and forest soils from the same region reacted to stressors like warming, drought, pollution, and microplastics, and found each soil type responded in its own unique way, even under identical conditions. This matters because soil health underlies our food and water systems, and it means one-size-fits-all strategies for protecting soil from pollution and climate change won't work; instead, we need tailored approaches for different landscapes to keep growing healthy food and maintaining clean ecosystems as environmental pressures increase.
Abstract Global change factors (GCFs) are known to affect terrestrial ecosystems across a range of land-use types, including farmlands, grasslands, and forests. However, it remains unclear whether different landscape elements within the same region respond differently to the same global change pressures. Here, we investigated this question using four soils collected from co-located farmland, grassland, pine forest, and oak forest, representing distinct landscape elements under the same regional climatic conditions. Each soil was exposed to one of six individual GCFs, warming, drought, nitrogen deposition, salinity, microplastics, and antibiotics, as well as to all six factors combined. We found that landscape elements exhibited strongly divergent responses to the same GCFs. The effects on soil functions also varied among soils under combined stress, with responses diverging from different null-model predictions depending on soils and response variable. Moreover, landscape-element specific response patterns became more pronounced under multiple concurrent stressors. Overall, our findings show that landscape heterogeneity represents a mosaic of different capacities to resist and respond to global change, even under shared climatic and geographic conditions. Global change assessments and ecosystem models should therefore better account for landscape-level heterogeneity, and management strategies aimed at enhancing ecosystem resilience should be tailored to individual landscape elements.
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