| Summary: | The return of plant residues to the ground is used to promote soil carbon sequestration, improve soil structure, reduce evaporation, and help to fix additional carbon dioxide in the soil. The microbial communities with diverse ecological functions that colonize plant residues during decomposition are expected to be highly dynamic. We aimed to characterize microbial communities colonizing wheat straw residues and their ecological functions during the early phase of straw decomposition. The experiment, run in Central Germany, was conducted in a conventional farming system under both ambient conditions and a future climate scenario expected in 50–70 years from now. We used MiSeq illumina sequencing and network analysis of bacterial 16S rRNA and fungal ITS genes. Our results show that future climate alters the dynamics of bacterial and fungal communities during decomposition. We detected various microbial ecological functions within wheat straw residues such as plant growth-promoting bacteria, N-fixing bacteria, saprotrophs, and plant pathogenic fungi. Interestingly, plant pathogenic fungi dominated (~87% of the total sequences) within the wheat residue mycobiome under both ambient and future climate conditions. Therefore, we applied co-occurrence network analysis to predict the potential impacts of climate change on the interaction between pathogenic community and other bacterial and fungal microbiomes. The network under ambient climate consisted of 91 nodes and 129 correlations (edges). The highest numbers of connections were detected for the pathogens <i>Mycosphaerella</i><i> </i><i>tassiana</i> and <i>Neosetophoma</i><i> </i><i>rosigena</i>. The network under future climate consisted of 100 nodes and 170 correlations. The highest numbers of connections were detected for the pathogens <i>Pseudopithomyces</i><i> </i><i>rosae</i> and <i>Gibellulopsis</i><i> </i><i>piscis</i>. We conclude that the future climate significantly changes the interactions between plant pathogenic fungi and other microorganisms during the early phrase of decomposition.
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