Effects of field warming on high arctic soil bacterial community: a metagenomic analysis

Soil microbial communities in the Arctic, one of the
most rapidly warming regions on Earth, play an
important role in a range of ecological processes. This
report describes initial studies of natural soil bacterial
diversity at a High Arctic site on Svalbard, as part of
a long-term field environmental manipulation study.
The impact of increased soil temperature and water
availability on soil microbial communities was investigated.
The manipulation experiment, using open-top
chambers, was installed in late summer 2014, and the
soils were sampled soon after snow melt in July 2015.
High throughput sequencing of 16S rRNA genes showed
relatively uniform diversity across the study area and
revealed no significant initial effect of treatments
on bacterial communities over the first 10-month
autumn–winter–spring manipulation period.