Can soil microbes thrive in a changing climate?

economictimes.indiatimes.com:

Climate change, habitat degradation, and other human-caused environmental changes are putting organisms around the world under unprecedented stress. Predicting and mitigating the impacts of growing stress on organisms and the environmental services on which we rely involves knowing why some species can exist in a wide range of conditions while others can only exist in a few.

In the scientific field of ecology, researchers frequently attempt to categorise organisms on our planet into two groups: specialists and generalists. Specialists are more restricted or limited to specialised requirements for survival, whereas generalists may thrive in a wide range of environmental conditions and habitats.

The panda bear, for example, only eats bamboo in its native habitat. Not only is their geographical range limited, but so is their diet; if the bamboo plant goes extinct, panda bears may go extinct as well.

But what about the hidden microscopic world that exists everywhere on Earth, from the human gut to the earth beneath our feet? Which category do they belong to? To find the answer, a group of graduate and postdoctoral students in associate professor Michelle Afkhami’s biology lab at the University of Miami College of Arts and Sciences studied the DNA sequences of prokaryotes, a group of microbes that include all bacteria and archaea. The findings are in a recent study entitled, “Multidimensional specialization and generalization are pervasive in soil prokaryotes,” now available in the journal Nature Ecology & Evolution.