Eco-evolutionary dynamics reshape microbial respiratory responses to warming.

Evolutionary temperature compensation and substrate-conditioned species sorting reshape microbial respiratory responses to sustained warming, producing attenuation of thermal sensitivity over time.

• Why it matters: Earth System Models project a strong positive carbon–climate feedback from microbial respiration, but experiments often show thermal sensitivity attenuates under sustained warming.
• What they did: The work proposes an eco-evolutionary mechanism where compensation lowers baseline rates, sorting shifts biomass among lineages, and interactions alter aggregate responses, with dynamics paced relative to warming.
• The result: Embedding these eco-evolutionary dynamics into trait-based models could improve carbon–climate projections by better representing attenuation mechanisms.

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