Experimental warming leads to convergent succession of grassland archaeal community

Understanding the temporal succession of ecological communities and the underlying mechanisms in response to climate warming is critical for future climate projections. However, despite its fundamental importance in ecology and evolution, little is known about how the Archaea domain responds to warming. Here we showed that experimental warming of a tallgrass prairie ecosystem significantly altered the community structure of soil archaea and reduced their taxonomic and phylogenetic diversity. In contrast to previous observations in bacteria and fungi, we showed convergent succession of the soil archaeal community between warming and control. Although stochastic processes dominated the archaeal community, their relative importance decreased over time. Furthermore, the warming-induced changes in the archaeal community and soil chemistry had significant impacts on ecosystem functioning. Our results imply that, although the detrimental effects of biodiversity loss on ecosystems could be much severer, the soil archaeal community structure would be more predictable in a warmer world.