Data from: Environmental change alters nitrogen fixation rates and microbial parameters in a subarctic biological crust ...

• Main Authors: Salazar, Alejandro, Warshan, Denis, Vásquez, Clara, Andrésson, Ólafur
• Format: Dataset
• Language: English
• Published: Dryad 2022
• Subjects: Biological Soil Crust BSC; nitrogen N fixation; Climate change; subarctic ecosystems; cyanobacterial abundance and composition; FOS Biological sciences; glacier; Iceland; Salix herbacea; Subarctic
• Online Access: https://dx.doi.org/10.5061/dryad.x95x69pmw; https://datadryad.org/stash/dataset/doi:10.5061/dryad.x95x69pmw

Together, Biological Soil Crust (BSC) and other cryptogamic groundcovers can contribute up to half of the global nitrogen (N) fixation. BSC also stabilizes the soil (reducing erosion and dust emissions), fixes carbon (C), retains moisture, and acts as a hotspot of microbial diversity and activity. Much of the knowledge about how climate change is affecting the composition and functioning of BSC comes from hot arid and semiarid regions. The comparatively smaller body of research on BSC from cold and mesic environments has been primarily observational, for example along chronosequences after a glacier retreat. Few studies have experimentally investigated the effects of the environment on BSC from high latitudes. Such experiments allow unraveling of relationships at a resolution that can only be achieved by controlling for confounding factors. We measured short-term (2-4 days) responses of a liverwort-based (Anthelia juratzkana) BSC from the south of Iceland to a range of temperature, moisture and light ... : We designed a controlled laboratory experiment to investigate the responses of a subarctic liverwort-based (Anthelia juratzkana) BSC from the south of Iceland to different levels of temperature, moisture and light. We studied how these environmental factors affect the capacity of subarctic BSC to fix N, and whether these responses were linked to changes in the abundance of N fixers and/or to structural changes in the BSC microbial communities. 1. Sample collection In September 2018 we collected BSC from a site adjacent to the Climate Research Unit at Subarctic Temperatures (CRUST) experiment (Salazar et al., in progress), near Landmannahellir, Iceland (64°02' N, 19°13' W; 590 m.a.s.l.). Mean annual temperature and precipitation at the site are ca. 5 °C and 1500 mm, respectively. Surface cover in this area is primarily liverwort-based BSC (ca. 50%), followed by mosses (ca. 30%) and Salix herbacea dwarf willow (ca. 20%), on an andosol/vitrisol substratum. We randomly collected eight BSC blocks (i.e. ...