Vincent E J Jassey, Tristan Lafont Rapnouil, Marie Le Geay, Romain Walcker, Laure Gandois, Maialen Barret, Nicolas Fanin, Bjorn J M Robroek, Béatrice Lauga, Luke O Andrews, Alix Badré Greuza, Mark R Bakker, Guillaume Bertrand, Tobias Birkwald, Paulo A V Borges, Brian Branfireun, Francis Q Brearley, Cécile Brousseau, Zhao-Jun Bu, Jean-François Carrias, Sarah Coffinet, Bruno Corbarra, Eduardo M F Dias, Ellen Dorrepaal, André-Jean Francez, Yuwen Fu, Marvin Gabriel, Rosalina Gabriel, Stéphanie Gerin, Daniel Gilbert, Sébastien Gogo, Gustaf Granath, Emma Gray, Liam Heffernan, Thierry J Heger, Sari Juutinen, Paul Kardol, Edgar Karofeld, Agata Klimkowska, Martin Küttim, Liisa Küttim, Olivia Kuuri-Riutta, Terri Lacourse, Mariusz Lamentowicz, Gaël Le Roux, Zoë Lindo, Roy Mackenzie, Katarzyna Marcisz, Yuri A Mazei, Natalia G Mazei, Cândida M F Mendes, Edward A D Mitchell, Juanita Mora-Gomez, Raphael Müller, Kathy Pouliot, Anna-Helena Purre, Achim Quaiser, Brenda Riquelme-Del Río, Allison R Rober, Line Rochefort, Ana C Rodríguez, A Britta K Sannel, Fabian Seemann, Laurent Servière, Maria Strack, Graeme T Swindles, Julie Talbot, Andrey N Tsyganov, Eeva-Stiina Tuittila, Alexander T Tveit, Minna M Väliranta, Kevin H Wyatt, Henni Ylänne, Zicheng Yu, Evgeny A Zarov, Samuel Hamard
Bacterial communities are vital to northern peatlands' carbon and nutrient cycling, one of the Earth's largest terrestrial carbon stores. However, their diversity and ecological roles at broad geographic scales remain partially understood, limiting our ability to predict their response to global change. Here, we combine a trans-Holarctic survey across 171 Sphagnum-dominated peatlands (SDPs) with a continental-scale reciprocal transplantation experiment to quantify how bacterial diversity shapes carbon and nutrient cycling across bioclimatic gradients. We show that bacterial diversity and composition differ markedly among peatland bioclimatic regions and are primarily structured by the universal abiotic drivers of northern ecosystems: minimum temperature, snow cover, and soil water content. Ecological models further revealed that deterministic processes accounted for approximately 80% of bacterial community assembly, highlighting the strong influence of environmental filtering. Biodiversity-Ecosystem Function analyses identified bacterial richness as a key driver of carbon and nutrient cycling. Using moving-window structural equation models, we identified a critical bacterial richness threshold, below which extracellular enzyme activities increased by ~60%. This transition coincided with stronger environmental filtering and shifts towards bacterial communities with a greater predicted potential for extracellular nutrient acquisition and heterotrophic metabolism. Together, these findings demonstrate that bacterial richness underpins peatland biogeochemical functioning and suggest that biodiversity loss may accelerate carbon turnover, weakening the capacity of northern peatlands to retain carbon. As climate change threatens this unique microbiome, safeguarding bacterial diversity will be critical for maintaining ecosystem resilience and the stability of this globally important carbon sink.