Back

A general temperature dependence for biological nitrogen fixation across systems and levels of organization

O'Connor, M. I.; Slein, M. A.; Davis, K. E.

2025-06-23 ecology
10.1101/2025.06.17.660177 bioRxiv
Show abstract

Biological nitrogen fixation (BNF) provides half of global new nitrogen annually and plays an important role in biodiversity patterns and global biological carbon uptake processes. BNF rates accelerate with warming, with known implications for ecological functioning, yet the strength of this temperature sensitivity and its context dependence are not well understood. Here we synthesize 70 controlled experimental tests of the acute temperature dependence of nitrogen fixation rates and demonstrate that BNF rates accelerate with temperature in a remarkably consistent manner across biological systems. BNF temperature dependence is also consistent across levels of biological organization from enzyme to community, mirroring scaling of metabolic temperature dependence across levels of organization for respiration, photosyn-thesis and methane production. This analysis provides the first evidence of general, scalable effects of temperature on nitrogen fixation rates, which can be used to better predict shifts in coupled carbon-nitrogen systems with global change.

Matching journals

The top 6 journals account for 50% of the predicted probability mass.

50% of probability mass above

"Similar papers" are the closest papers from that journal in the model's embedding space. They show what the match is built on, but the ranking comes mostly from a classifier over the whole training set, not from these examples alone.