Integrating Microbial Community Data Into an Ecosystem-Scale Model to Predict Litter Decomposition in the Face of Climate Change

Litter decomposition is an important ecosystem process and global carbon flux that has been shown to be controlled by climate, litter quality, and microbial communities. Process-based ecosystem models are used to predict responses of litter decomposition to climate change. While these models represent climate and litter quality effects on litter decomposition, they have yet to integrate empirical microbial community data into their parameterizations for predicting litter decomposition. To fill this gap, our research used a comprehensive leaf litterbag decomposition experiment at 10 temperate forest U.S. National Ecological Observatory Network (NEON) sites to calibrate (7 sites) and validate (3 sites) the MIcrobial-MIneral Carbon Stabilization (MIMICS) model. MIMICS was calibrated to empirical decomposition rates and to their empirical drivers, including the microbial community (represented as the copiotroph-to-oligotroph ratio). We calibrate to empirical drivers, rather than solely rates or pool sizes, to improve the underlying drivers of modeled leaf litter decomposition. We then validated the calibrated model and evaluated the effects of calibration under climate change using the SSP 3–7.0 climate change scenario. We find that incorporating empirical drivers of litter decomposition provides similar, and sometimes better (in terms of goodness-of-fit metrics), predictions of leaf litter decomposition but with different underlying ecological dynamics. For some sites, calibration also increased climate change-induced leaf litter mass loss by up to 5%, with implications for carbon cycle-climate feedbacks. Our work also provides an example for integrating data on the relative abundance of bacterial functional groups into an ecosystem model using a novel calibration method to bridge empiricism and process-based modeling, answering a call for the use of empirical microbial community data in process-based ecosystem models. We highlight that incorporating mechanistic information into models, as done in this study, is important for improving confidence in model projections of ecological processes like litter decomposition under climate change.