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Microorganisms are vital in mediating the earth’s biogeochemical cycles; yet, despite our rapidly increasing ability to explore complex environmental microbial communities, the relationship between microbial community structure and ecosystem processes remains poorly understood. Here, we address a fundamental and unanswered question in microbial ecology: ‘When do we need to understand microbial community structure to accurately predict function?’ We present a statistical analysis investigating the value of environmental data and microbial community structure independently and in combination for explaining rates of carbon and nitrogen cycling processes within 82 global datasets. Environmental variables were the strongest predictors of process rates but left 44% of variation unexplained on average, suggesting the potential for microbial data to increase model accuracy. Although only 29% of our datasets were significantly improved by adding information on microbial community structure, we observed improvement in models of processes mediated by narrow phylogenetic guilds via functional gene data, and conversely, improvement in models of facultative microbial processes via community diversity metrics. Our results also suggest that microbial diversity can strengthen predictions of respiration rates beyond microbial biomass parameters, as 53% of models were improved by incorporating both sets of predictors compared to 35% by microbial biomass alone. Our analysis represents the first comprehensive analysis of research examining links between microbial community structure and ecosystem function. Taken together, our results indicate that a greater understanding of microbial communities informed by ecological principles may enhance our ability to predict ecosystem process rates relative to assessments based on environmental variables and microbial physiology.

Microbial communities present in marine sediments play a central role in nitrogen biogeochemistry at local to global scales. Along the oxidation-reduction gradients present in sediment profiles, multiple nitrogen cycling processes (such as nitrification, denitrification, nitrogen fixation, and anaerobic ammonium oxidation) are active and actively coupled to one another—yet the microbial communities responsible for these transformations and the rates at which they occur are still poorly understood. We report pore water geochemical (O2, NH4+, NO3-) profiles, quantitative profiles of archaeal and bacterial amoA genes, and ammonia oxidation rate measurements, from bioturbated marine sediments of Catalina Island, California. Across triplicate sediment cores collected offshore at Bird Rock and within Catalina Harbor, oxygen penetration (0.24-0.5 cm depth) and the abundance of amoA genes (up to 9.30 x 107 genes g-1) varied with depth and between cores. Bacterial amoA genes were consistently present at depths of up to 10 cm, and archaeal amoA was readily detected in Bird Rock cores, and Catalina Harbor cores from 2008, but not 2007. Although detection of DNA is not necessarily indicative of active growth and metabolism, ammonia oxidation rate measurements made in 2008 (using isotope tracer) demonstrated the production of oxidized nitrogen at depths where amoA was present. Rates varied with depth and between cores, but indicate that active ammonia oxidation occurs at up to 10 cm depth in bioturbated Catalina Harbor sediments, where it may be carried out by either or both ammonia-oxidizing Archaea and Bacteria.